This article is a quantitative study of contrastive negation in 11 European languages, using parallel and monolingual corpus data. Contrastive negation refers to expressions that combine a negated and an affirmed element so that the affirmed element replaces the negated one. In the languages being studied, there is typically a large number of constructions that fall under this definition. One of the ways of expressing contrastive negation is through a corrective conjunction (e.g. but in not once but twice). In this paper, constructions with a corrective conjunction are compared to other contrastive negation constructions by constructing a probabilistic semantic map on the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of parallel corpus data using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). The data comes from the Europarl corpus, which represents the proceedings of the European Parliament. The results suggest that in this discourse type, corrective conjunctions are associated with additive contrasts (e.g. not only once but twice), while constructions without an additive are mostly replacive (e.g. It's not you, it's me). However, some languages also display correctives that are more weakly or not at all associated with additivity. The results display an areal and genealogical core of Germanic languages and French, with the other Romance and the Finnic languages studied deviating from this core in various ways. The results are evaluated against monolingual corpus data from the Finnish component of the same corpus. Overall, the study suggests that parallel corpora are a promising source of data even for a grammatical domain in which the languages studied have seemingly analogous constructions.

This paper discusses constructional variation in the domain of contrastive negation in English, using data from the British National Corpus. Contrastive negation refers to constructs with two parts, one negative and the other affirmative, such that the affirmative offers an alternative to the negative in the frame in question (e.g. shaken, not stirred; not once but twice; I don’t like it – I love it). The paper utilises multiple correspondence analysis to explore the degree of synonymy among the various constructional schemas of contrastive negation, finding that different schemas are associated with different semantic, pragmatic and extralinguistic contexts but also that certain schemas do not differ from each other in a significant way.

This is a comparative investigation of contrastive negation in English and Finnish, i. e. combinations of a negated and an affirmed part construed as alternatives to one another. In both languages, there are several constructions that express contrastive negation, but their division of labour remains unclear. The aims of the paper are two-fold: first, to see what constructional strategies are available for contrastive negation in the two languages and, second, to see how the strategies are motivated by its interactional functions. In English, contrastive negation may be expressed by using the adversative conjunction but correctively (e. g. It’s not the bikers but the other vehicle on the road), whereas standard Finnish has a specialised corrective conjunction vaan alongside the adversative mutta. Moreover, many constructions can express contrastive negation, including ones without a conjunction (e. g. It’s not the bikers, it’s the other vehicle on the road). An analysis of conversational data shows that English favours constructions without conjunctions, while in Finnish constructions both with and without conjunctions are frequent. The uses of contrastive negation are divided into reactive and non-reactive. The pragmatic functions largely explain the usage patterns, and these in turn can explain the cross-linguistic regularities of corrective conjunctions.