Abstract

This chapter proposes a corpus-based investigation and a semantic analysis of the Italian word "altro" ‘other’, focusing on two values of "altro" identified in the previous literature: difference (D-interpretation) and increment along a scale (M-interpretation). In syntax-based studies, focused on cardinal noun phrases, the two values have been related to distinct syntactic positions occupied by "altro" within the NP’s extended projection (Cinque 2015, Kayne 2021): a lower position, associated with the D-interpretation (altro N = ‘other kind of N’), and a higher position, associated with the M-interpretation (altri n N = ‘n more tokens of N’). Conversely, discourse-based studies assume that the two values are due to a lexical ambiguity of "altro", with the D-interpretation being triggered by a discourse relation of contrast and the M-interpretation by an additive relation (Gianollo and Mauri 2020). We examine the distribution of the two values in the CORIS corpus of contemporary Italian (Rossini Favretti et al. 2002) and consider the question of whether they are equally basic interpretations or one of them is derivable from the other. The analysis we propose relies on the idea that the semantic core of "altro" is the relation of non-identity. The D-interpretation and M-interpretation result from the interaction between this semantic core and features of the larger discourse context, with additive and contrastive features playing a major role. Non-identity is introduced in the semantic representation of the sentence irrespective of the syntactic position of "altro", while discourse context—including lexical properties of the noun—determines at what ontological level (whether type or token) non-identity is evaluated. The analysis is cast in the framework of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher and Lascarides 2003), which allows a modular representation of the separate contributions of "altro" and discourse structure.