Comparing corrective constructions: Contrastive negation in parallel and monolingual data

Abstract

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.

Not Just Contrastive: Constructions with Negated Restrictives in English

“…On the basis of this, only not just is more frequent in speech than in writing, given that 17.3 percent of this variant are spoken. Overall, negated restrictives seem to be slightly more frequent in writing than in speech, as also suggested in Tottie (1986:101) and Silvennoinen (2017).…”

“…(10) He doesn't only/just/merely/simply like her (-he loves her). ( 11 (Horn 2000:151, slightly adapted) Negated restrictives thus seem to occur often in larger contrastive patterns in which the negative clause is accompanied by a correction (Silvennoinen 2017). The correction typically appears as a continuation, as in ( 15), but it may also precede negation, as in ( 16).…”

Negatives and Meaning: Social Setting and Pragmatic Effects. Using Negatives in Political Discourse, Social Media and Oral Interaction

“…From a usage-based perspective, negation is globally more frequent in spoken language than in written texts , and more prevalent in conversation when compared to fiction, news and academic texts . Additionally, different negative constructions are considered representative of either spoken or written language, formal or informal register, and dialogical or monological structure (Palacios Martinez, 1995;Silvennoinen, 2017;Xiao & McEnery, 2010). Usage differences are found between the full form not and the contracted form n't: for instance, there is a preference for not in writing and for n't in spoken language (Xiao & McEnery, 2010).…”

“…These are constructional strategies of contrastive negation (McCawley, 1991;Silvennoinen, 2017), which are a type of metarepresentational negation (Albu, 2012a;2012b). The constituents in the scope of negation represent discourse-old information, while the corrected information represents discourse-new information.…”

“…It may, however, be more costly, demanding more cognitive effort in retrieving what the negated information represents and to whom it may be attributed. These constructional forms are employed more frequently in speech than in writing, as conversations are usually dominated by asyndetic clause combinations (Silvennoinen, 2017). Similarly, no corrective conjunctions are used in the corpus, and additionally, there does not seem to be much consistency at the level of the punctuation mark used, as the negative segment can be delimited by commas, full stops and dashes.…”