Not…Until across European Languages: A Parallel Corpus Study

Henriëtte De Swart,Bernhard Wälchli,Jos Tellings

doi:10.3390/languages7010056

Henriëtte De Swart, Bernhard Wälchli + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7010056

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Abstract

We present a parallel corpus study on the expression of the temporal construction ‘not…until’ in a sample of European languages. We use data from the Europarl corpus and create semantic maps by multidimensional scaling, in order to analyze cross-linguistic and language-internal variation. This paper builds on formal semantic and typological work, extending it by including conditional constructions, as well as connectives of the type as long as. In an investigation of 7 languages, we find that (i) languages use many more different constructions to convey this meaning than was expected from the literature; and (ii) the combination of polarity marking (negation/assertion) strongly correlates with the type of connective. We corroborate our results in a larger sample of 21 European languages. An analysis of clusters and dimensions of the semantic maps based on the enlarged dataset shows that connectives are not randomly distributed across the semantic space of the ‘not…until’-domain.

Highlights

This paper is a corpus study of ‘not. . . until’ constructions across a sample of European standard languages extracted from the parallel text corpus Europarl (Koehn 2005)
In order to achieve a better understanding on the amount of variation with respect to connective choice found in D1, we construct a new dataset D2 that is smaller in terms of parallel datapoints, is based only on a single initial search string (Swedish förrän) and is restricted to clause linkage, but contains more languages
We set out with a set of paraphrases and our research questions concerned the ways these strategies are reflected in the cross-linguistic corpus data, how the different strategies interact with polarity, to what extent diversity is constrained cross-linguistically and language-internally and what the interplay of temporality and conditionality is in the ‘not. . . until’ domain

Summary

Introduction

This paper is a corpus study of ‘not. . . until’ constructions across a sample of European standard languages extracted from the parallel text corpus Europarl (Koehn 2005). This paper is a corpus study of ‘not. Until’ constructions across a sample of European standard languages extracted from the parallel text corpus Europarl (Koehn 2005). The guidelines are not implemented until the end of 2010. Until in (1) is a temporal preposition linking two event phases: a negative pre-phase of not implementing the guidelines is followed by a positive post-phase of implementation of the guidelines. The change from the negative to the positive phase occurs at or shortly after the time denoted by the NP complement of until (the end of 2010). Until can link two clauses, as in (2).

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