Comparing corrective constructions: Contrastive negation in parallel and monolingual data

Abstract

This article is a quantitative study of contrastive negation in 11 European languages, using parallel and monolingual corpus data. Contrastive negation refers to expressions that combine a negated and an affirmed element so that the affirmed element replaces the negated one. In the languages being studied, there is typically a large number of constructions that fall under this definition. One of the ways of expressing contrastive negation is through a corrective conjunction (e.g. but in not once but twice). In this paper, constructions with a corrective conjunction are compared to other contrastive negation constructions by constructing a probabilistic semantic map on the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of parallel corpus data using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). The data comes from the Europarl corpus, which represents the proceedings of the European Parliament. The results suggest that in this discourse type, corrective conjunctions are associated with additive contrasts (e.g. not only once but twice), while constructions without an additive are mostly replacive (e.g. It’s not you, it’s me). However, some languages also display correctives that are more weakly or not at all associated with additivity. The results display an areal and genealogical core of Germanic languages and French, with the other Romance and the Finnic languages studied deviating from this core in various ways. The results are evaluated against monolingual corpus data from the Finnish component of the same corpus. Overall, the study suggests that parallel corpora are a promising source of data even for a grammatical domain in which the languages studied have seemingly analogous constructions.