Abstract
Abstract This is a comparative investigation of contrastive negation in English and Finnish, i. e. combinations of a negated and an affirmed part construed as alternatives to one another. In both languages, there are several constructions that express contrastive negation, but their division of labour remains unclear. The aims of the paper are two-fold: first, to see what constructional strategies are available for contrastive negation in the two languages and, second, to see how the strategies are motivated by its interactional functions. In English, contrastive negation may be expressed by using the adversative conjunction but correctively (e. g. It’s not the bikers but the other vehicle on the road), whereas standard Finnish has a specialised corrective conjunction vaan alongside the adversative mutta. Moreover, many constructions can express contrastive negation, including ones without a conjunction (e. g. It’s not the bikers, it’s the other vehicle on the road). An analysis of conversational data shows that English favours constructions without conjunctions, while in Finnish constructions both with and without conjunctions are frequent. The uses of contrastive negation are divided into reactive and non-reactive. The pragmatic functions largely explain the usage patterns, and these in turn can explain the cross-linguistic regularities of corrective conjunctions.
Highlights
This paper focuses on contrastive negation, i.e., expressions that combine a negated and an affirmed part that stand as alternatives to one another (McCawley 1991)
The findings suggest that are the linking strategies used to different degrees, they are different in their syntactic behaviour: the Finnish vaan in particular is syntactically freer than its English. In one quarter (English) counterpart, the corrective but
I return to the four constructional parameters and the ways in which the usage patterns of the constructional strategies can be related to the interactional functions of contrastive negation. (i) Number of contrasted elements
Summary
This paper focuses on contrastive negation, i.e., expressions that combine a negated and an affirmed part that stand as alternatives to one another (McCawley 1991). In addition to the asyndetic coordination exemplified in (1), contrastive negation may be expressed syndetically, using a corrective conjunction (e.g. but in It’s not the bikers but the other vehicle that’s on the road). Correctivity, which is the relation that holds between the two elements in contrastive negation, means that one element is replaced by another Languages with this distinction include German (aber and sondern), Spanish (pero and sino) and Finnish (mutta and vaan). The former is adversative and the Finnish example contains mutta, while the latter is corrective and the conjunction is vaan; in the English translations of both, but is used It is constructions like (3) that will be the topic of this paper
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