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Article published In:
Constructional Approach(es) to Discourse-Level Phenomena: Theoretical challenges and empirical advances
Edited by Renata Enghels and María Sol Sansiñena
[Constructions and Frames 13:1] 2021
► pp. 55–81

Not-fragments and negative expansion

| Université de Lille | Laboratoire STL UMR 8163 – CNRS

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.

Keywords: constructions, ellipsis, negative expansion, not-fragment, stripping
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
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00047.cap
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