The notions of self and other and the opposition between them are likely universal and relevant for the understanding of human nature on many levels. In particular, they are integral to social cognition (relations between oneself and others in social contexts) and to human grammar (linguistic expressions like same, self, other, different etc.) and they are unexpectedly complex in both domains. Assuming that linguistic complexity goes together with cognitive complexity, investigating linguistic expressions of otherness (and sameness) promises new insights for social cognition.

Linguistic scholarship has a long tradition dealing with the relations of sameness, yet surprisingly little is known about the ways languages build expressions of otherness and the uniform/varying grammatical properties of these expressions. This project aims to fill this gap by running a comparative syntactic analysis of the expressions of otherness in a number of (unrelated) languages. This will result in an empirical database presenting the cross-linguistic variation in the expression of otherness and a theoretical model that captures this variation.

Preliminary research shows that the expressions of otherness exhibit unexpected syntactic behaviour cross-linguistically and can be attributed to different grammatical categories. The project also aims to shed new light on categorisation in grammar through a thorough investigation of one phenomenon. Under the assumption that linguistic complexity goes hand in hand with cognitive complexity, language creates a unique lens to understand the cognitive structure underlying the concept of otherness.

• comparative syntax
• cross-linguistic variation
• generative syntax
• morpho-syntax

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