Negative Stripping in English: A Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

Stripping, also called bare argument ellipsis, is taken to be an elliptical construction that unexpresses everything from a clause except one constituent (e.g., Susan works at night, and Bill too.). It can also accompany the negator not, which we call Not-Stripping (e.g., Alan likes to play volleyball, but not Sandy.). This paper reviews key grammatical properties of Not-Stripping in English and investigates its authentic uses with the online corpus COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). The paper then performs some quantitative and qualitative research of the extracted data and discusses theoretical implications. The result from corpus investigation shows that Not-Stripping preferably used as PP remnant. Its register distribution also shows that Not-Stripping is most frequently used in fiction register followed by spoken, and magazine registers which may indicate that Not-Stripping is mainly used in colloquial context. In terms of category match/mismatch types, the construction is overtly used as mismatching relation between the remnant and the correlate. In addition, in case of merger/sprouting types, Not-Stripping seems to favor merger type, but sprouting type can be regarded as frequently used type. The grammatical function of both remnant and correlate are preferably used as modifier. The data for Not-Stripping are dealt with move-and-delete operations to postulate putative clausal source. Observing such attested data challenging the derivation of negative stripping from syntactic movement operations, the paper challenges a direct licensing construction-based analysis of the construction.