Construction(s) of the common ground: contrastive negation in English Olli O. Silvennoinen
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Helslang colloquium, 19 November 2015 University of Helsinki, General Linguistics
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Contents of the talk • What is contrastive negation? • What kinds of negative-contrastive constructions are there? • What do they do?
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PhD project (2015-2018) • Method: corpus linguistics • Data: British National Corpus (BNCweb) • Writing: national broadsheet newspapers, c. 3,000,000 words • Speech: a subset of the demographic sample
• Theoretical background: usage-based, constructional, cognitive
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Contrastive negation (1) Replacive contrast a. b.
Savoy is not an archaeologist but an explorer. Come on Grant, it's you that's gotta do it, not mummy or me.
• subtype: restrictive contrast c.
The project flourished because France was an authoritarian, but not totalitarian, state.
(2) Additive contrast a. b.
‘There is a moral crisis in sport, not only in Canada but on a worldwide scale,’ he said. At any rate, non-violence was on its way to becoming a political objective, not merely a moral one.
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Contrastive negation • syntax: at least two parts, one negative, the other affirmative • semantics: the two parts are in the same domain, they are replaceable by one another • pragmatics: used to correct some contextually salient proposition or utterance (Gates & Seright 1967; Horn 1985, 1989; McCawley 1991)
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More or less constructionalised? • In one short story, In a Good Cause (1951), he explored the idea that political strength could lie not in unity but in disunity. (W:arts) • Not out of obsession with the abnormal; just for the pleasure. (W:arts) • ‘Najibullah mustn't flee, he must surrender,’ he said. (W:misc)
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Common ground • What participants believe, and believe that the other participants believe, too (Stalnaker 2002) • Information that participants can access or at least accommodate (see e.g. Lambrecht 1994) • Managed and created by the speakers through linguistic choices – (inter)subjectivity (Verhagen 2005; Traugott 2012)
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Negation and the common ground ‘negatives are uttered in a context where corresponding affirmatives have already been discussed, or else where the speaker assumes the hearer’s belief in—and thus familiarity with—the corresponding affirmatives.’
(Givón 1978: 109)
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Negation and the common ground • Traditional theory: negation tackles a preceding or otherwise discourse-active affirmative • Preventing or repairing problems in the common ground (Deppermann 2014)
• Empirical findings: not so (at least not always) • The corresponding affirmative is usually present in the discourse only indirectly (through inference) or not at all (Tottie 1991)
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Fragment 1: Expo 92 will be ready mañana Expo's commissioner general, Emilio Cassinello, is adamant that all will be finished by next week. Standing on top of the Mexican pavilion, still an empty shell with a few plants sprinkled over the roof and a 1,500-year-old cactus guarding the entrance, he said: ‘I am not only sure that Expo will be ready on the day. I am absolutely convinced.’ (BNC: W:newsp:brdsht_nat:misc, AK9, 682-684)
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Fragment 1: analysis • Denial = negating something that has been said or thought in the preceding context (Tottie 1991) • Orienting to problems in the common ground, and correcting them
• But here there is no real correction; the construction is used rhetorically (or ‘metalinguistically’: Horn 1985, 1989) (only) sure < absolutely convinced
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Mechanisms of denial (Geurts 1998) a)
Proposition denial It is Americans who remake foreign films, not the other way around. b) Presupposition denial With Severiano Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Ian Woosnam and several leading Americans also in the field, Olazabal does not have the incentive of trying to gain a place in next week’s World Matchplay at Wentworth: he has already been invited to play in the event this year. c) Implicature denial It is not difficult but plain impossible for any poll to anticipate swings of opinion, such as certainly took place last week. d) Form denial When, I wonder, did it become fashionable for politicians to talk not about the world but about the planet. www.helsinki.fi/yliopisto
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Fragment 2: Midwife at the birth of a state This has been a constant theme of Intifada policy: that we wish to build (Palestine), not to destroy (Israel); that we wish to achieve freedom (for our people), not to deprive others (Israelis) of it; that we wish to protect and save lives (ours), not to endanger the lives of others (Israelis). In one of several Intifada leaflets written in Hebrew and addressed to the Israeli soldiers on duty in the occupied territories, the message was repeated: Soldier, go home. Return to your family and children. Be with them in peace so that we may remain with our family and children in peace. We do not wish to harm you, or your state. We wish to be unharmed, in our own state. (BNC: W:newsp:brdsht_nat:misc, A9J, 40‒45)
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Fragment 2: analysis • Cluster of conventional and semi-conventional oppositions (Jones et al. 2012; Davies 2013) Palestinians / Israelis build / destroy achieve freedom / deprive others of it protect and save / endanger harm you / be unharmed • Main function not corrective; rather the purpose is to reinforce the contrast between Palestine and Israel • Intended to enrich the common ground: us vs. them www.helsinki.fi/yliopisto
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Fragment 3: What do you want for breakfast? None 2837 Or what?
Clare 2838 Marmalade sandwiches please. None 2839 Ok. Clare 2840 Thank you. None 2841 Just for you. Clare 2842 I'm going away next weekend, not next weekend. None 2843 Monday. Clare 2844 Monday. (BNC: S:conv, KCD, 2832‒2844; conversation recorded by `Helen' between 31 May and 1 June 1991.) www.helsinki.fi/yliopisto
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Fragment 3: analysis • Co-constructed negative-contrastive construction? Clare 2842 I'm going away next weekend, not next weekend. None 2843 Monday. Clare 2844 Monday. • The contrastive reading of the negation is created by someone else than the speaker who produced the negation itself • Emergent grammatical construction (Hopper 1987) or ‘a linguist’s category’ (Laury & Ono 2014:562)? • Clearly corrective (self-initiated other-repair: Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977); mutual orientation towards repairing the common ground www.helsinki.fi/yliopisto
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Discussion • At best, an indirect relation between contrastive negation and correction • Basic meaning: fixing problems in the common ground > possibility of exploitation? (cf. Stalnaker 2002)
• Variety of forms > how to explain the choice of any given construction? • Next step: quantitative corpus linguistics, multivariate statistics (see e.g. Gries 2015; Tagliamonte & Baayen 2012)
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References 1/2 •
Davies, Matt 2013. Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse. London & New York: Bloomsbury.
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Deppermann, Arnulf 2014. "Don't get me wrong": Recipient design by using negation to constrain an action's interpretation. In Susanne Günthner, Wolfgang Imo & Jörg Bücker, eds. Grammar and Dialogism: Sequential, Syntactic, and Prosodic Patterns between Emergence and Sedimentation. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 15-51.
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Gates Jr., Dave L. & Orin Dale Seright 1967. Negative-contrastive constructions in standard modern English. American Speech 42(2): 136-141.
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Geurts, Bart 1998. The mechanisms of denial. Language 74(2): 274-304.
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Givón, Talmy 1978. Negation in language: Pragmatics, function, ontology. In Peter Cole, ed. Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, 69-112.
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Gries, Stefan Th. 2015. The most under-used statistical method in corpus linguistics: multi-level (and mixed-effects) models. Corpora 10(1): 95-125.
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Hopper, Paul 1987. Emergent grammar. Berkeley Linguistics Society 13: 139-157.
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Horn, Laurence R. 1985. Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity. Language 61: 121174.
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Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: CSLI Publications.
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References 2/2 •
Jones, Steven, M. Lynne Murphy, Carita Paradis & Caroline Willners 2012. Antonyms in English: Construals, Constructions and Canonicity. Cambridge: CUP.
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Lambrecht, Knud 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: CUP.
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Laury, Ritva & Tsuyoshi Ono 2014. The limits of grammar: Clause combining in Finnish and Japanese conversation. Pragmatics 24(3): 561-592.
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McCawley, James D. 1991. Contrastive negation and metalinguistic negation. CLS 27(2): 189206.
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Schegloff, Emanuel A., Gail Jefferson & Harvey Sacks 1977. The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53: 361-382.
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Stalnaker, Robert 2002. Common ground. Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 701-721.
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Tagliamonte, Sali & R. Harald Baayen 2012. Models, forests, and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice. Language Variation and Change 24(2): 135-178.
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Tottie, Gunnel 1991. Negation in English Speech and Writing: A Study in Variation. San Diego: Academic Press.
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Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2012. Intersubjectification and clause periphery. English Text Construction 5(1): 7-28.
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Verhagen, Arie 2005. Constructions of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition. Oxford: OUP.
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Thank you!
[email protected]
@OlliSilv
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