In recent years we have increasingly heard the expression “rather than” be used with a disjunctive value, replacing “or” or “or”. This use of the phrase – for example “we can eat pizza rather than sushi” – is, however, an increasingly widespread error, also thanks to its widespread use on TV and in newspapers. The “rather than”, in fact, is a conjunctive phrase with an adversative value: it is used as “instead of” and “instead of” to express a contrast or logical opposition, the preference of one element over the other (“better A rather than B”). To clarify:
Give me a hand rather than sitting there just sitting around” (you could also say: give me a hand instead of sitting there just sitting around. I would rather go on holiday in the mountains rather than at the seaside.
The error lies, as we said at the beginning, in using this phrase with a disjunctive value (with the meaning “or”), because as the Accademia della Crusca reports “it can create substantial ambiguities in communication and compromise the fundamental function of language”. For example: In the sentence “We could go to the cinema this evening rather than at the theatre” the statement using “rather than” with disjunctive value can create misunderstandings. Whoever uttered the sentence means that one could go “to the cinema instead of the theatre” (adversative value) or that these are two equally valid alternatives (“to the cinema or to the theatre” with disjunctive value). According to what is reported in the text of the Accademia della Crusca, the use of “rather than” with disjunctive value It has northern origins and does not originate in popular speech, but in medium-high social environments, probably with a hint of linguistic snobbery. Frequently, in fact, terms and phrases that speakers perceive as “more cultured” are used more frequently even with improper uses, as in this case. The phenomenon was already attested in the early 1980s among young people in Turin and then spread on a national scale starting from the mid-1990s, especially thanks to strong media exposure. In particular, television, radio, journalism and advertising have played a decisive role in propagating this use, which quickly moved from the media spotlight to written and spoken language, progressively infiltrating formal and scholastic contexts as well.
