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Poster De Conférence Année : 2023

Difference and incrementality: a study of the polysemy of "altro" ('other') in Italian

Résumé

Natural languages present a vast array of phenomena lying at the interface between grammar and logic and linguists have shown that many interpretational phenomena rest on an implicit system of natural logic (Chierchia 2013). A large part of these phenomena belongs to pragmatics, in particular the domain of scalar reasoning (Fox 2007). Another area that deserves careful study is the rich domain of functional items. The modern enterprise of formal semantics has flourished in the fruitful attempt to analyze a core component of this functional domain, namely, that part of the vocabulary that consists of quantificational determiners and adverbs (Frege 1892, Russell 1905, Montague 1973). Less studied within this tradition are words that exhibit a clear logical meaning in some core uses, while showing a more diversified syntactic distribution and, correlatively, a variation in their semantic behavior, from the type of purely functional (logic-based) items to that of more contentful lexical items. The study of such words provides an interesting window on the interface between language and logic, as it shows, often in insightful ways, how logical meaning interacts with linguistic structure.In this talk we consider one such word in Italian, "altro" (‘other’), and examine its syntactic distribution and semantic properties. Semantically, "altro" varies from an adjective-like meaning, roughly corresponding to ‘qualitatively different’ (e.g. "la sinistra di allora era altra da quella di oggi" ‘left-wing politics at that time was qualitatively different from today's’), to a two-sided logical meaning: (i) negation of identity (different-interpretation; e.g. "non questo libro, un altro" ‘not this book, another one’) and (ii) increment along a scale (more-interpretation; e.g. "vorrei ancora un altro caffé" ‘I’d like to have one more coffee’). This complex logical meaning has been analyzed in recent contributions. Syntax-based studies (Cinque 2015, Kayne 2021), mostly focused on cardinal noun phrases, have shown that there is a correlation between the two logical values of "altro" and different syntactic positions that this word occupies within the NP’s extended projection: a lower position, close to the noun head and associated with kind/type-level entities, would select the different-interpretation ("altra persona" = ‘other kind of person’), whereas a higher position, close to the cardinal phrase and associated with token-level entities, would select the more-interpretation ("altre due persone" = ‘two more tokens of the kind PERSON’). Other accounts, based on corpora and paying more attention to inter-sentential relations, claim that "altro" is lexically ambiguous between ‘different’ and ‘more’: the different-interpretation would be triggered by the discourse relation of contrast, while the more-interpretation by an additive discourse relation (Gianollo & Mauri 2020).We analyze the issue whether the two logical meanings of "altro" are irreducible to one another, or whether one of them is to be taken as basic, with the other one being derived via pragmatic inference. Based on extensive corpus data, we argue that non-identity is the semantic core of "altro", since it is demonstrably (even though sometimes only trivially) present in the semantic representation of all sentences containing "altro", and it so constitutes the basic interpretation of the word, while the more-interpretation is the result of the interaction between the core non-identity meaning and features of the larger discourse context, with additive and contrastive relations playing indeed a major role. On the one hand, our proposal differs from Cinque’s (2015) account in that the core non-identity meaning posited by our theory is introduced in the sentence’s semantic representation no matter what the syntactic position of "altro" is, while discourse context contributes to determining the relevant ontological level at which non-identity is to be evaluated. On the other hand, we depart from Gianollo & Mauri’s (2020) account in that we provide a unified semantics for "altro" and neatly separate its core meaning from other components to be ascribed to discourse structure.Our analysis is cast in Asher & Lascarides’ (2003) Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, a flexible framework allowing a modular representation of the separate contributions of "altro" and discourse structure. It contributes to our understanding of the interactions between logic and linguistic structure from the perspective of a polysemous word.

Domaines

Linguistique
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hal-04206290 , version 1 (13-09-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04206290 , version 1

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Fabio Del Prete, Fabio Montermini. Difference and incrementality: a study of the polysemy of "altro" ('other') in Italian. 49th Annual Meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Jun 2023, Pittsburgh, PA, United States. . ⟨hal-04206290⟩
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