Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The nature of “other” terms:

interaction with (in)definiteness and quantification

Chiara Gianollo (Università di Bologna)

Italian altro ‘other’ can express a non-identity meaning (‘different’) but also a purely additive meaning (‘further’). In both cases, the interpretation of altro establishes an anaphoric link with a distinct discourse entity that is either the term of comparison (under the non-identity reading, (1)) or an element belonging to a homogeneous set (under the additive reading, (2)).

(1) Vorrei che mi fosse assegnato un altro ufficio. L’ufficio dove sono ora è troppo rumoroso.

‘I would like to be assigned another office. The office where I am now is too loud.’

(2) Questa lingua ha morfologia agglutinativa. Un’altra proprietà di questa lingua è il suo ordine di base SOV.

‘This language has agglutinating morphology. Another property of this language is its SOV basic word order.’

In this talk I present evidence from joint work with Caterina Mauri (Gianollo & Mauri 2020) concerning the interaction with contextual factors, chiefly (in)definiteness and quantification, that determine the intended reading in a corpus of spoken Italian. Furthermore, I discuss how the Italian data fit into the broader cross-linguistic picture emerging from recent studies on  the dimensions of variation involved by terms for ‘other’ (a.o., Beck 2000, Breban 2003, Eguren & Sánchez 2003, 2004, Oxford 2010, Charnavel 2015, Cinque 2015, Brugè 2018, Brugè & Giusti 2021, Gianollo & Mauri 2026 and other contributions in Amaral (ed.) 2026). In particular, data from the questionnaire developed by Gianollo & Mauri (2026) show that the distinction between the additive and the non-identity reading of ‘other’ may correspond to separate expressions (e.g. in German) or to ambiguous ones (e.g. in Italian). Furthermore, a third relevant reading emerges, namely complementarity, whereby ‘other’ anaphorically refers to the remaining, or complementary, part of a presupposed dual set. Languages may use three separate expressions for complementarity ‘other’, additivity ‘other’ and non-identity ‘other (cf. Turkish), or use the same form for complementarity and non-identity ‘other’ and a different form for additivity, or use one and the same form for all three cases.

References   

Amaral, Patrícia (ed.). 2026. Other: Ambiguity, Constraints, and Change. Leiden: Brill.

Beck, Sigrid. 2000. The semantics of different: comparison operator and relational adjective. Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 101–139.

Breban, Tine, 2003. The grammaticalization of adjectives of identity and difference in English and Dutch. Languages in Contrast 4.1, 165–199.

Brugè, Laura. 2018. Otro: Consideraciones a favor de su no inclusión en la categoría determinante. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 7.2, 109–134.

Brugè, Laura & Giuliana Giusti. 2021. Some notes on outro in Portuguese. Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Universidade do PortoN.o Especial 2021, 441–471.

Charnavel, Isabelle. 2015. Same, different andother as comparative adjectives – A uniform analysis based on French. Lingua 156, 129–174.

Cinque, Guglielmo. 2015. A note on ‘other’. In Cinque, Guglielmo (ed.), Charting the Landscape of Linguistics. Webschrift for Josef Bayer. Konstanz: Universität Konstanz, 22–27.

Eguren, Luis & Cristina Sánchez. 2003. La gramática de otro. Revista de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística, 33.1, 69–123.

Eguren, Luis & Cristina Sánchez. 2004. Contrast and addition in Romance: A case study in microvariation. In Auger, Julie, Clancy J. Clements, Barbara Vance (eds.), Contemporary Approaches to Romance Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 159–176.

Gianollo, Chiara & Caterina Mauri. 2020. Uno, l’altro e un altro ancora: ambiguità dell’alterità tra sincronia e diacronia. Quaderni di Semantica Special issue, 131–174.

Gianollo, Chiara & Caterina Mauri. Investigating ‘other’ in cross-linguistic perspective: theoretical and methodological challenges. In Amaral, Patrícia (ed.), 229-266.

Oxford, Will 2010. Same, other, and different: A first look at the microsyntax of identity adjectives. Proceedings of the 2010 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, 1–15.