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UniversalDependencies / UD_English-EWT

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"other than" #275

Open nschneid opened 2 years ago

nschneid commented 2 years ago

i want to know if there are any good places to buy an ice-cream sundae from other than mc donalds

The current analysis (which seems to be the prevailing one in EWT, though there are a couple inconsistencies) is to treat "other" as an amod of "places".

This was surprising to me. Intuitively it feels like "other than" might deserve to be treated as a multiword preposition (e.g. with fixed or double case). Certainly plain "other" and "other than X" do not have the same distribution:

Is this just heavy modifier shift or something special about "other" + "than"?

amir-zeldes commented 2 years ago

Mm, just heavy modifier shift for me. In Hebrew adjectives are postposed, and adding these kinds of arguments to such adjectives feels like a regular add-on. And semantically it's "other" which licenses a comparison, so it makes sense for it to govern a "than"-PP.

rueter commented 2 years ago

One possible equivalent to "other than" coild be "disregarding", but that doesn't always work.

As for the double case or fixed adp, we would want some adp positions added, first.

I want to know if there are any good places to eat at [[other than] at ]McDonalds.

I hope this addition can help in the expansion of a discussion of: " in addition to", "separately from", disregarding...

nschneid commented 2 years ago

I want to know if there are any good places to eat at [[other than] at ]McDonalds.

Cf. There is no better place to eat than at McDonalds.

I think this has to do with "than" licensing a PP complement. Not sure it resolves how to treat the "other" in "other than".