Romanian alt in a pan-Romance perspective

This paper confirms Nicolae and Cornilescu’s (2011, 2012) hypothesis that alt ‘other’ can be an existential quantifier and can be part of complex existential quantifiers in combination with the indefinite article, cardinals and vague quantifiers. This creates a number of competing forms (bare alt vs. un alt, alt > Card vs Card > alt, Q > alt vs alt > Q) which interact in a complex fashion with the pronominalizing morphology appearing in nominal ellipsis. The diagnostics applied to Italian altro and Portuguese outro by Brugè and Giusti (2021) are systematically applied to alt in a survey, whose results confirm the same tendencies of speaker preferences found in the other Romance languages: bare alt is favoured onto un alt, alt > Card wins over Card > alt and Q > alt wins over alt Q. This confirms Brugè and Giusti’s hypotheses that complex quantifiers are listed in the lexicon and not freely formed in the syntax. It also favours the hypothesis that QP is above DP and not vice versa.