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Article published In: Constructions and Frames
Vol. 10:1 (2018) ► pp.1–37

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Constructional schemas in variation

Modelling contrastive negation

 | University of Helsinki
Published online: 30 August 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00009.sil
Abstract
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methods
  • 3.The variables
    • 3.1Variables related to meaning and form
      • 3.1.1Semantic type
      • 3.1.2Target of negation
      • 3.1.3Negator
    • 3.2Variables related to information structure
      • 3.2.1Weight
      • 3.2.2Focus structure
      • 3.2.3Activation
    • 3.3Contextual variable: genre
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Univariate and bivariate results
    • 4.2Multiple correspondence analysis
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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