New contrastive PronType?

[Stormur]

Let's consider some pronouns/determiners like

lat. alius, alter; it. altro; eng. other, another; gr. άλλος; ...

Now, where it is annotated as a PRON/DET (but often it is considered an ADJ...) it seems that most agree about PronType=Ind. We are indeed using this value in our Latin treebanks too, but, personally, I would say more due to a lack of more fitting values than true conviction.

In fact, no word in the examples covers the same area of alter: I think that this word is referring to something quite precise, and the precision is given by the contrast to something else. One out of many observation is that e.g. in Italian we can and often have to precise the definiteness of altro: l'altro 'the other (one)' vs. un altro 'an other (one)'. This is not allowed with demonstratives like questo 'this (one)' or quello 'that (one)', and some indefinites only allow the undefined article: (una) qualche persona '(a) some person'.

So, what is the opinion of the community about the introduction of a PronType=Contr? Wouldn't it fill a void of current PronTypes?

[dan-zeman]

For me this word was an adjective, although I admit that this is a bias caused by selected datasets and traditional grammars, and the meaning feels at least partially pronominal.

Would you propose to also include the word same in the category, besides other?

If it is a new pronominal type at all, then I would label it PronType=Con because all other prontypes are three-letter strings.

[Stormur]

I don't think that same would fit into the PronType=Con category, but this is another interesting issue, because now that you say that... as of now they are counted as PronType=Emp, but I have always been left wondering if this "sameness" is emphatic. The traditional Latin denomination for elements like idem 'the same', ipse '-self' is "determinatives". There are others like totidem 'the same number of'. Maybe here just a change of denomination from Emp to Det would improve the situation?

In any case, another element I would consider in Latin is uter 'which one of two? / the one of the two that / either one of two'. It has a sense of indefiniteness as an interrogative, but otherwise it seems to precise something through contrast.