Not-fragments and negative expansion
This paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such
fragments can be partially accounted for by a known type of ellipsis, namely ‘stripping’, it is argued here that this type is best treated
as a construction in its own right, with formal, semantic and pragmatic properties specific to it. One useful concept is what could be
called ‘negative expansion’. This is a discourse-level construction whereby an already negative clause is followed by one or more negative
clause fragments, whose negation is a repetition, rather than cancellation, of the negation in the preceding clause, as in It will
never happen. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Some theoretical considerations on fragments and ellipsis
- 3.The Not X! construction
- 3.1Why Not X! is not produced by deletion
- 3.2A constructionist treatment of Not X!
- 4.Negative expansion
- 5.Conclusion and further questions
- Notes
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References