SEDUC MT 2025 — Questão 40 · Pronomes | Pronouns

Leia o texto a seguir para responder às próximas três questões.

Is other a verb?

$$ Like many English words, other possesses great flexibility in meaning and function. Over the past few centuries, it has served as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a pronoun. In recent decades, other has increased its part-of-speech portfolio to include verb use, having acquired the meaning "to treat or consider (a person or a group of people) as alien to oneself or one's group.” Some people find it disconcerting when a word takes on a new part of speech, a process known as functional shift. The phenomenon is quite common, however -- our language contains many thousands of words which are reported to have been formed in this fashion.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/other.

In the sentence taken from the text “Over the past few centuries, it has served as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a pronoun”, the pronoun in bold letters refers to the word “other”. Sometimes, though, “it” does not have a referent and serves a grammatical function only, thus being named, for example, “dummy it”. Mark the alternative in which “it” has a referent.