The Diachrony of Spanish otro

Abstract

This chapter explores the diachrony of Spanish otro (‘other’) based on a corpus of representative texts from the 13th, 16th, and 19th centuries, with attention to its syntactic and semantic features. Eguren and Sánchez (2003, 2004) argue that medieval otro behaved like an adjective, similar to French autre, and label it as a determiner (D). Brugè (2018) argues that contemporary otro is both an adjective and a quantifier and rejects its grammaticalisation into a D. We show that the critical change in the distribution of otro throughout the written history of the Spanish language is the loss of some properties, especially those traditionally linked to the part of speech adjective, such as the reduction in its use as a comparative (e.g. otro que ese) or in its combination with the indefinite un (‘a’). Further, we claim that, from the 13th to the 19th century, prenominal otro could already license prenominal subjects, be the head of a partitive construction, and display the semantics of an indefinite quantifier with a core meaning of contrast. We conclude that otro was as multi-categorial in the past as it is today and that its diachrony is better understood as a series of small transitions linked to other changes in the Romance noun phrase. Show more