UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI Shaken, not stirred A Construction Grammar account of contrastive negation in English Olli Oskari Silvennoinen Pro gradu thesis English Philology Department of Modern Languages Supervisor: Roderick McConchie University of Helsinki 27 September, 2013 Table of contents 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 1.1 Contrast and opposition ................................................................... 1 1.2 Overview ......................................................................................... 2 2 CONTRASTIVE NEGATION....................................................................... 4 2.1 Forms of contrastive negation ......................................................... 4 2.2 Meanings of contrastive negation .................................................. 10 2.3 Summary ....................................................................................... 13 3 CONTRAST ............................................................................................ 14 3.1 Pragmatic contrast ......................................................................... 14 3.1.1 Contrast in information structure .......................................... 14 3.1.2 Negation and contrast ............................................................ 16 3.2 Lexical contrast ............................................................................. 18 3.2.1 Lexical contrast: codified or created in use? ......................... 18 3.2.2 Kinds of lexical contrast ........................................................ 20 3.3 Pragmatic and lexical contrast: contrastive constructions ............. 23 3.3.1 Contrastive constructions ...................................................... 23 3.3.2 How opposites are created ..................................................... 25 3.4 Summary ....................................................................................... 28 4 CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR ................................................................. 29 4.1 What is Construction Grammar? ................................................... 29 4.2 Families of constructions ............................................................... 31 4.3 Contrast in Construction Grammar ............................................... 32 4.3.1 Paired focus constructions ..................................................... 33 4.3.2 Constructions, contrast and antonymy ................................... 34 4.3.3 Parallelism as a construction ................................................ 38 5 DATA AND METHODS ............................................................................ 40 5.1 Data: newspaper discourse ............................................................ 40 5.2 Methods: corpus-based linguistics ................................................ 42 i 6 RESULTS ............................................................................................... 44 6.1 Contrastive negation in the corpus ................................................ 44 6.1.1 Overview ................................................................................ 44 6.1.2 Grammatical forms of contrasted elements ........................... 49 6.1.3 Extraposition and other forms of discontinuity ...................... 50 6.1.4 Related constructions ............................................................. 51 6.2 Contrastive negation and contrast relations ................................... 54 6.2.1 Pragmatic contrast relations ................................................. 54 6.2.2 Lexical contrast relations ....................................................... 56 6.3 Contrastive negation in Construction Grammar ............................ 63 6.3.1 Overview ................................................................................ 63 6.3.2 The constructions ................................................................... 64 6.3.3 Relations among constructions .............................................. 68 6.3.4 Contrastive constructions and CONTRAST ............................... 74 7 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................ 76 REFERENCES ................................................................................................ 79 APPENDIX: CODING CATEGORIES ............................................................... 83 ii List of tables Table 1. Forms of contrastive negation ................................................ 8 Table 2. Contrastive frames in Jones et al. (2012) ............................. 24 Table 3. National broadsheet newspapers in the BNC ....................... 40 Table 4. Contrastive negation in the three subcorpora ....................... 44 Table 5. Raw frequencies of forms of contrastive negation by subcorpus ............................................................................................ 45 Table 6. Contrasted elements by grammatical category ..................... 49 Table 7. Forms of discontinuity in the data ........................................ 51 Table 8. Pragmatic contrast relations in the data ................................ 54 Table 9. Lexical contrast relations in the data .................................... 57 Table 10. Antonym subclasses in the data .......................................... 58 Table 11. Co-hyponym subclasses in the data .................................... 60 Table 12. Other lexical contrast relations in the data ......................... 61 List of figures Figure 1. A subordination analysis of X not Y (Gates Jr. and Seright 1967:138) .............................................................................................. 5 Figure 2. A subordination analysis of not X but Y (Gates Jr. and Seright 1967:138) ................................................................................. 5 Figure 3. A Cognitive Grammar analysis of not X but Y (Izutsu 2008:671) ............................................................................................ 11 Figure 4. The black–white antonym construction (following Jones et al. 2012:117) ....................................................................................... 36 Figure 5. Unification of a contrastive construction and an antonym construction (following Jones et al. 2012:120)................................... 37 Figure 6. The Antonym Construction (Jones et al. 2012:119) ........... 37 Figure 7. The Parallelism Construction .............................................. 39 Figure 8. The X not Y construction .................................................... 65 Figure 9. The not X but Y construction .............................................. 66 Figure 10. The X but not Y construction ............................................ 66 Figure 11. The X and not Y construction ........................................... 67 iii Figure 12. The not X, Y construction ................................................. 68 Figure 13. Instance links from the Paired Focus Construction ........... 69 Figure 14. Instance links from the X CONJ not Y construction ........ 70 Figure 15. Polysemy of but ................................................................. 71 Figure 16. Instance links from the (CONJ) not X (CONJ) Y construction......................................................................................... 71 Figure 17. Instance links from the Negative Construction to the Constituent Negation Construction and the negative-contrastive constructions ....................................................................................... 72 Figure 18. The inheritance network of negative-contrastive constructions ....................................................................................... 73 Figure 19. Degrees of contrastiveness ................................................ 75 List of symbols, abbreviations and conventions * Ungrammatical ? Questionable ?? Very questionable # Unintended meaning (e.g., #shaken but not stirred) CAPITALS Stress in examples (e.g., WHAT is an antonym?) Overstrike Ellipsis (e.g., Lee loves Kim, and Kim loves Lee) SMALL CAPS Name of a semantic concept (e.g., SIZE as the concept domain for large and small) 1S First-person singular (in glosses) AdjP Adjective phrase AdvP Adverb phrase BNC British National Corpus CG Cognitive Grammar CxG Construction Grammar NP Noun phrase PP Prepositional phrase VP Verb phrase iv 1 Introduction 1.1 Contrast and opposition Most English speakers are aware that there are two ways to make a martini. This is not the result of studying the various ways of preparing cocktails. Rather, it is caused by the following all-too-familiar utterance: (1) Shaken, not stirred. Ordinarily, shake and stir are not regarded as semantically related. However, in (1) their semantics are contrasted and a binary pair – martini shaken and martini stirred – is created in the domain of TYPES OF MARTINI. However, the nature of this process is unclear; more specifically, researchers disagree whether the contrast in (1) amounts to contextually determined opposition as opposed to mere contrast. Opposition is a much discussed but poorly understood phenomenon. It is related to antonymy, contrast and incompatibility, although researchers interpret these relations in various, sometimes contradictory ways. Apart from linguistics, it is studied in at least mathematics, philosophy and psychology. Opposites are thus not merely a matter of language; rather, they are said to be