Contrastive negation: Constructional variation within and across languages

Rinnakkaistallenteet Filosofinen tiedekunta

2020

Contrastive negation: Constructional variation within and across languages

Silvennoinen, Olli

Modern Language Society of Helsinki

Tieteelliset aikakauslehtiartikkelit

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The author defended his doctoral dissertation Contrastive Negation: Constructional Variation within and across Languages at the Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, on 18 October 2019. The opponent at the public defence was Professor Martin Hilpert (Université de Neuchâtel), and the defence was chaired by Professor Matti Miestamo (University of Helsinki). The introduction and conclusion of the article-based dissertation can be found at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-5527-6.

The dissertation that will be examined today has grown out of being puzzled. The puzzle that I have been trying to solve can be expressed as one question: why do we speak the way we do? Or more precisely: why do we say the things we do in the ways we do? To give you an example, why does a fictional secret agent say:

(1) Dry martini. Shaken, not stirred

After all, the same meaning could be conveyed through various other means:

(2) Shaken and not stirred

(3) I want my martini shaken, I don’t want it stirred.

(4) Not stirred but shaken (5) Not stirred – shaken

(6) I don’t want my martini stirred, I want it shaken.

The focus of my puzzlement has been this class of expressions that I call contrastive negation. The words on the screen illustrate just some of the possible ways of expressing contrastive negation in English. What makes an expression a case of contrastive negation? In other words, why should a dissertation focus on these – and only these – kinds of expressions as a group? There are certain shared features among the expressions that you can see here. There is a negative part (e.g. not stirred) but also a positive part, or in the terminology of linguistics, an affirmative part (e.g.

shaken). The negative and the affirmative are alternatives to one another. A drink that is shaken cannot be stirred – shaking undoes the effect of stirring, and so the two are mutually exclusive alternative ways of making a drink such as a martini.

Contrastive negation might seem like a minor topic. However, it has links to more general aspects of negation, one of the fundamental properties of human languages – indeed one of the few

phenomena that exist in all natural languages and also most if not all of the artificial ones. In 1917, the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen published his now-classic book Negation in English and Other Languages. In it, he stated that ‘the chief use of a negative [is] to contradict and to point a contrast’

(Jespersen 1917: 4–5). Jespersen is writing about all negation, but contrastive negation is probably the clearest example of this tendency and thus arguably goes to the heart of negation as a whole.

A dominant strand of research on contrastive negation has been the study of so called metalinguistic negation. In (7), the negation is metalinguistic: loving entails liking, and thus, if I love it, it is not literally true that I don’t like it – in fact, the opposite is the case. The negated verb is just an infelicitous way to phrase the matter, and the negation is a metalinguistic comment on this

infelicity. According to Laurence Horn’s (1989: 363) definition, metalinguistic negation is ‘a device for objecting to a previous utterance on any grounds whatever’ and these grounds may include implied meaning (as in (7)), style and register (as in (8)), even pronunciation (as in (9)):

(7) I don’t like – I love it.

(8) It’s not stewed bunny, honey, it’s civet de lapin.

(9) He didn’t call the pólis, he called the polís.

Interesting as such examples can be, they are actually only a small fraction of contrastive negation constructions as they are really used. They can only give as a skewed picture of what contrastive negation is like as a whole.

Despite the centrality of contrast to negation, James McCawley was able to state in 1998 that ‘[a]

use of negative elements that has largely been neglected by linguists is their contrastive use’

(McCawley 1998: 612, emphasis in the original), in other words, contrastive negation. What interest there has been in contrastive negation has mostly focused on the metalinguistic uses, which, as I said, are actually quite rare. McCawley himself authored one of the few comprehensive studies focusing specifically on contrastive negation (McCawley 1991; see also McCawley 1998: 612–

622), and it has been an important source of inspiration for my own dissertation.

In order to say what contrastive negation is like, we need to know how language itself works. If you don’t do theory, theory does you. My theoretical understanding of language is based on the view that language exists for communication. Speakers and hearers create meaning together, and the forms of language adapt to this. In the words of Joan Bybee (2010), language resembles sand dunes.

The wind moves grains of sand so that they coalesce and form dunes of varying sizes and shapes. It is difficult to say where one dune ends and another one begins. In a similar way, the grammatical constructions of a language are gradient and variable. Contrastive negation is no exception. I regard it as an adaptation to the communicative needs of speakers. We can think of these needs as the wind that moves the sand. This of course begs the question of what those communicative needs are – which way the wind blows. Finding at least a partial answer to this question was central to answering my main question.

The metaphor of the sand dune highlights the fact that languages and their constructions change constantly, albeit slowly. In fact, many grammatical constructions are highly conventionalised. As emphasised by Adele Goldberg (2019: 7), they are based on partially remembered or ‘lossy’

representations of previous experiences with those constructions. We use these constructions to communicate and for that to work, the conventions must be recognisable. They must be stored in the memories of individual speakers but these memory representations must also be fairly similar from one speaker to the next. My dissertation assumes that these memory representations include both form and function. In linguistic terminology, the name for such representations is construction.

I will now return to my original question: why do we say the things that we say in the ways in which we say them? I have sought the answer to this question from three sources. First, I have looked at English newspaper discourse, taken from the British National Corpus (see Hoffmann et al.

2008). Second, I have looked at English and Finnish casual conversation, taken from the British National Corpus, the Conversation Analysis Archive of Helsinki University and the Arkisyn corpus of the University of Turku. Thirdly, I have studied the proceedings of the European Parliament through the Europarl corpus (Koehn 2005), which is a parallel corpus of the translations in all the official languages of the European Union. I have specifically looked at 11 of those languages.

Based on these three kinds of data, my dissertation proposes at least three kinds of answers to my question. The first answer is that we take the situation in which we are speaking or writing into account. We opt to use contrastive negation especially when we are trying to argue for or against a

point. As an example of this, here are some examples of contrastive negation that I have collected from headlines on the opinion pages of various newspapers:

(10) Caught out that it was Abiy Ahmed, not Greta? I can help repurpose your rant content¹

(11) Our voting system needs reform – not photo ID²

(12) Brexiteers want Boris to take a delay and fight on for a better deal, not palm them off with a fudge³

(13) Female offenders need help, not prison⁴

The precise form of contrastive negation is also dependent in part on the situation. As we have seen, headlines of newspaper opinion pieces tend to favour the [shaken, not stirred] construction. By contrast, English conversation favours an altogether different construction type. Examples of this are provided by (14)–(15), the latter of which is repeated for convenience:

(14) It’s not you – it’s me.

(15) I don’t like it – I love it.

English conversational speech favours a simple juxtaposition of two clauses, the first one negative and the second one affirmative, perhaps aided by an appropriate intonation contour – what we might call the [It’s not you – it’s me] construction.

To repeat, the first answer to my question is that situation matters both for what we say and how we say it. The second answer is that what we say itself affects how we say it. In other words, meaning matters, too. For a long time, linguists have known that full synonymy is rare in language.

Neighbouring constructions, such as the various contrastive negation constructions, become specialised for certain contexts of use. The [shaken, not stirred] construction, for instance, is often used when the negated element, in this case the concept of stirring a drink, has not been overtly mentioned in the previous discourse. This might be the reason why it seems natural in the context of our secret agent ordering a drink from a bartender they have probably never met before.

One meaning distinction that proved crucial for contrastive negation is the kind of contrast being expressed. Contrasts may be between equals, in which case we call them replacive. An example of this is:

(16) Shaken, not stirred

They may also be between unequals, and this is shown by exclusive elements such as only and just.

Such an exclusive element may appear in the negative part of contrastive negation, in which case we call the construction additive, as in:

(17) Not only stirred but also shaken

Or it may appear in the affirmative part of the construction, in which case the construction is restrictive, as in:

1 Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/commentisfree (accessed on 16 October 2019).

2 Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/commentisfree (accessed on 16 October 2019).

3 Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/ (accessed on 16 October 2019).

4 Source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/#section-comment (accessed on 16 October 2019).

(18) Not shaken, just stirred

In English newspaper writing at least, the additive meaning is associated with the construction seen here: [not only X but also Y]. By contrast, the restrictive meaning favours the construction without the conjunction but.

In other languages studied in my dissertation, there were other associations with replacive, additive and restrictive meanings. In Italian, for instance, the rare corrective conjunction bensí, which otherwise is quite like English but in contrastive negation contexts, heavily favours replacive contexts and shuns additive ones almost completely in my data. In additive cases, the conjunction ma is almost always used in its stead, and indeed it is more common in all kinds of contrasts.

(19) Italian (Europarl)

non quest’ anno, bensí nel 2013

NEG this year but in 2013

‘not this year but in 2013’⁵ (20) Italian (Europarl)

non solo in Europa ma in tutto

NEG only in Europe but in all

il mondo the world

‘not only in Europe but also worldwide’

In Portuguese, the normal conjunction for contrastive negation is mas. You can see an example here. However, for additive contexts, the conjunction como is also available (in addition to them, it has a range of other meanings).

(21) Portuguese (Europarl)

Esta situação não penalizará apenas this situation NEG punish only

para os transportadores, mas também

P the carriers but also

os seus clientes directos, retalhistas the their clients direct retailers

e consumidores finais da União Europeia.

and consumers final of Union European

‘It will not only be the carriers which will suffer as a result of this, but also their direct customers, retailers and end customers in the European Union.’

(22) Portuguese (Europarl)

os nossos jovens não apenas aprofundam

the our young NEG only deepen

os seus conhecimentos em domínios específicos

the their knowledge in domains specific

como também alargam os seus horizontes.

as also broaden the their horizons

5 I use the following glosses: 3SG (third person singular), ADE (adessive case), CNG (connegative), NEG (negation), P (preposition).

‘our young people are not only furthering their knowledge in specific subject areas, but are also broadening their horizons.’

These observations hint at the third meaning that my dissertation gives for my question: the language matters. To give just one more example, and to return to my previous example about English conversation, Finnish conversation functions somewhat differently from English conversation. As I said before, English conversation favours the [It’s not you – it’s me]

construction. Finnish, in contrast to English has not one but two corrective conjunctions: vaan and the rarer and more colloquial kun, and both of these are perfectly normal in conversational speech.

Here is an example of vaan, taken from the Conversation Analysis Archive of the University of Helsinki.

(23) Finnish (Conversation Analysis Archive)

se ei oo suinkaan sillon enää illalla

it NEG.3SG be.CNG at.all then anymore evening.ADE

vaan se on päivällä jo

but it is day.ADE already

‘it isn’t in the evening but during the day already’

Is this all? Are these three answers enough? I’m afraid not. There is at least one other source of variation that my dissertation does not address, and that is variation according to the speaker. There may be variation that stems from the speaker’s social background such as their age, gender, social class, place of residence. There may also be variation that stems from more idiosyncratic personal preferences for one of the various contrastive negation constructions that we have seen today.

Perhaps the secret agent that I mentioned at the beginning of my talk simply happens to like this construction very much and chooses to use it because of that. Exploring this kind of variation – this answer to my original question – lies beyond the scope of the present dissertation.

University of Helsinki OLLI O.SILVENNOINEN

REFERENCES

Bybee, Joan. 2010. Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goldberg, Adele E. 2019. Explain Me This: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of Constructions. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Hoffmann, Sebastian, Stefan Evert, Nicholas Smith, David Lee & Ylva Berglund Prytz. 2008.

Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb ‒ a Practical Guide. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen: Høst. Reprinted in The Selected Writings of Otto Jespersen, 3–151. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Koehn, Philipp. 2005. Europarl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. MT Summit 2005.

McCawley, James D. 1991. Contrastive negation and metalinguistic negation. CLS 27(2). 189–206.

McCawley, James D. 1998. The Syntactic Phenomena of English. Second edition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.