Investigating ‘Other’ in Cross-Linguistic Perspective: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges

The study explores the dimensions of variation connected to the semantic space covered by ‘other’ and similar terms, and the challenges associated with their theoretical and cross-linguistic investigation. It focuses on the ambiguity between the non-identity and additive readings of ‘other’ across various Indo-European and non Indo-European languages. Cross-linguistic data collection for such a subtle semantic distinction is challenging. Therefore, in the paper we provide a detailed discussion on the design of the questionnaire which allowed us to systematically investigate how languages handle this ambiguity. The elicitation tasks are organized around the dimensions of qualitative comparison and set construction, also considering factors like (in)definiteness and quantification. Given the high context-dependence of the interpretation of ‘other’, the questionnaire includes a description of the utterance contexts to provide a clear discourse background for the elicitation tasks. Furthermore, the risk represented by translation bias is mitigated by adding completion tasks and requests for metalinguistic judgements. The questionnaire was tested on a sample of 12 languages, revealing systematic cross-linguistic variation in the encoding of ‘other’. Data confirm the cut-off point between the additive and the non-identity reading of ‘other’, which may correspond to separate expressions (e.g. in German) or to ambiguous ones (e.g. in Italian). Furthermore, a third reading turned to be relevant, namely complementarity, whereby ‘other’ anaphorically refers to the remaining, or complementary, part of a presupposed dual set. Complementary ‘other’ is indeed not compatible with an additive reading, and projects non-identity at the token level, not at the type level. We observed that 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.