The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 21, No. 0, pp.912-935
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2021
Received 23 Aug 2021 Revised 23 Sep 2021 Accepted 28 Sep 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.21..202109.912

A Corpus Study of the English Negative Stripping Construction and its Theoretical Consequences

Jungsoo Kim
Lecturer, Dept. of English Linguistics and Literature, Kyung Hee University jungsookim@khu.ac.kr


© 2021 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The so-called English negative stripping construction (e.g., Lee speaks Korean fluently, but not Japanese) has received little attention and previous literature has mainly focused on the position of the negation marker not, making use of a limited amount of data constructed on the basis of individual researchers’ own introspection. In this paper, I first investigate its grammatical properties based on attested corpus data and show that a variety of intriguing real life uses of the construction challenge the previous focus movement + PF deletion analyses. I then argue that a Direct Interpretation (DI) analysis, making use of structured discourse information as well as syntactic and semantic information, can provide a better account for its authentic grammatical properties.

Keywords:

English negative stripping construction, focus movement + PF deletion, direct interpretation, corpus-based, construction-based

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