Your browser does not support the PubReader view.
Go to this page to see a list of supporting browsers.
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

References

  • Bellert, I. 1977. On semantic and distributional properties of sentential adverbs. Linguistic Inquiry 8(2), 337-351.
  • Busquets, J. 2006. Stripping vs. VP-Ellipsis in Catalan: What is deleted and when? Probus 18(2), 159-187. [https://doi.org/10.1515/PROBUS.2006.006]
  • Chaves, R. 2012. On the grammar of extraction and coordination. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30(2), 465-512. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9164-y]
  • Chung, S., W. Ladusaw and J. McCloskey. 1995. Sluicing and logical form. Natural Language Semantics 3, 239-282. [https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01248819]
  • Culicover, P. and R. Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199271092.001.0001]
  • Davies, M. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca, /.
  • Depiante, M. 2000. The Syntax of Deep and Surface Anaphora: A Study of Null Complement Anaphora and Stripping/Bare Argument Ellipsis. Doctoral dissertation, University of Connecticut.
  • Drubig, H. 1994. Island constraints and the syntactic nature of focus and association with focus (Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereichs 340, no. 51). Tübingen: University of Tübingen.
  • Fox, D. and H. Lasnik. 2003. Successive cyclic movement and island repair: The difference between sluicing and VP-ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 34, 143-154. [https://doi.org/10.1162/002438903763255959]
  • Gates, D. and O. Seright. 1967. Negative-contrastive constructions in standard modern English. American Speech 42(2), 136-141. [https://doi.org/10.2307/453965]
  • Ginzburg, J. 2012. The Interactive Stance: Meaning for Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199697922.001.0001]
  • Ginzburg, J. and I. Sag. 2000. Interrogative Investigations. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
  • Hankamer, J. and I. Sag. 1976. Deep and surface anaphora. Linguistic Inquiry 7(3), 391-428.
  • Jackendoff, R. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Jacobson, P. 2016. The short answer: Implications for direct compositionality (and vice versa). Language 92(2), 331-375. [https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2016.0038]
  • Johnson, C. and C. Fillmore. 2000. The FrameNet tagset for frame-semantic and syntactic coding of predicate-argument structure. In Proceedings of the 1st Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ANLP-NAACL 2000), 56-62. Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Johnson, K. 2018. Gapping and stripping. In J. van Craenenbroeck and T. Temmerman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis, 562-604. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198712398.013.24]
  • Kay, P. and I. Sag. 2012. Cleaning up the big mess: Discontinuous dependencies and complex determiners. In H. Boas and I. Sag, eds., Sign-Based Construction Grammar, 229-256. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
  • Kim, J.-B. 2015a. Fragments in Korean: A direct interpretation approach. Studies in Generative Grammar 25, 703-733. [https://doi.org/10.15860/sigg.25.3.201508.703]
  • Kim, J.-B. 2015b. Syntactic and semantic identity in Korean sluicing: A direct interpretation approach. Lingua 166, 260-293. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.08.005]
  • Kim, J.-B. and A. Abeillé. 2019. Why-stripping in English: A corpus-based perspective. Linguistic Research 36(3), 365-387. [https://doi.org/10.17250/khisli.36.3.201912.002]
  • Kim, J.-B. and J. Kim. 2020. On swiping in English: A direct interpretation approach. Studies in Generative Grammar 30(4), 487-516.
  • Kim, J.-B. and J. Nykiel. 2020. The syntax and semantics of elliptical constructions: A direct interpretation perspective. Linguistic Research 37(2), 327-358.
  • Kim, J.-B. and P. Sells. 2011. The big mess construction: Interactions between the lexicon and constructions. English Language and Linguistics 15(2), 335-362. [https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674311000062]
  • Kim, J. 2019. Negative stripping in Korean: A non-ellipsis, anaphoric analysis. Korean Journal of Linguistics 44(3), 363-394. [https://doi.org/10.18855/lisoko.2019.44.3.003]
  • Kolokonte, M. 2008. Bare Argument Ellipsis and Information Structure. Doctoral dissertation, Newcastle University.
  • Konietzko, A. 2016. Bare Argument Ellipsis and Focus. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. [https://doi.org/10.1075/la.233]
  • Lobeck, A. 1995. Ellipsis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lyngfelt, B. 2012. Re-thinking FNI: On null instantiation and control in Construction Grammar. Constructions and Frames 4(1), 1-23. [https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.4.1.01lyn]
  • McCawley, J. 1991. Contrastive negation and metalinguistic negation. In L. Dobrin, L. Nichols and R. Rodriquez, eds., Papers from the 27th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Part Two: The Parasessions on Negation, 189-206. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
  • Merchant, J. 2003. Remarks on stripping. Ms., University of Chicago.
  • Merchant, J. 2004. Fragments and ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy 27, 269-289. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-005-7378-3]
  • Merchant, J. 2006. Why no(t)? Style 40(1), 20-23.
  • Miller, P. 2014. A corpus study of pseudogapping and its theoretical consequences. In C. Piñón, ed., Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics, vol. 10, 73-90. Paris: CSSP.
  • Nykiel, J. 2013. Clefts and preposition omission under sluicing. Lingua 123, 74-117. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.10.011]
  • Reinhart, T. 1991. Elliptic conjunctions: Non-quantificational LF. In A. Kasher, ed., The Chomskyan Turn, 360-384. Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell.
  • Ross, J. 1969. Guess who? In R. Binnick, A. Davison, G. Green and J. Morgan, eds., Proceedings of the 5th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 252-286. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.
  • Ruppenhofer, J. and L. Michaelis. 2014. Frames and the interpretation of omitted arguments in English. In S. Bourns and L. Myers, eds., Linguistic Perspectives on Structure and Context: Studies in Honor of Knud Lambrecht, 57-86. Amsterdam: Benjamins. [https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.244.04rup]
  • Sag, I. and J. Nykiel. 2011. Remarks on sluicing. In S. Müler, ed., Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 188-208. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
  • Van Eynde, F. 2007. The big mess construction. In S. Müller, ed., Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 415-433. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
  • Veloudis, J. 1982. Negation in Modern Greek. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Reading.
  • Winkler, S. 2005. Ellipsis and Focus in Generative Grammar. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton. [https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110890426]
  • Wurmbrand, S. 2017. Stripping and topless complements. Linguistic Inquiry 48(2), 341-366. [https://doi.org/10.1162/LING_a_00245]
  • Yoshida, M., C. Nakao and I. Ortega-Santos. 2015. The syntax of why-stripping. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 33(1), 323-370. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9253-9]