Constructions and Frames - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2018

This paper discusses constructional variation in the domain of contrastive negation in English, using data from the British National Corpus. Contrastive negation refers to constructs with two parts, one negative and the other affirmative, such that the affirmative offers an alternative to the negative in the frame in question (e.g. shaken, not stirred; not once but twice; I don’t like it – I love it). The paper utilises multiple correspondence analysis to explore the degree of synonymy among the various constructional schemas of contrastive negation, finding that different schemas are associated with different semantic, pragmatic and extralinguistic contexts but also that certain schemas do not differ from each other in a significant way.

Characterizing paraphrases formally has proven to be a challenging task. Hasegawa et al. (2011) pointed out the usefulness of FrameNet for paraphrase research, focusing on paraphrases which are backed by underlying classical linguistic relationships such as synonymy or voice alternations. This article proposes that other frame-to-frame-relations, notably Using, can serve as a source for concept-based paraphrases – that is, paraphrases that are backed by common sense knowledge, as in he called him a hero – he praised him for being a hero. While the predicates in these sentences are not synonymous, we would argue that the sentences are paraphrases – albeit of a kind that involves world knowledge about the relationship between different event classes. In this article, we propose a shallow taxonomy for the frame pairs which instantiate Using, that is motivated by their ability to form concept-based paraphrases. Second, we analyze the subclass of Using instances which supports concept-based paraphrasing, and provide a formalization of some prominent types of side conditions that are necessary to produce felicitous paraphrases.

This paper investigates the asymmetrical behavior of Sources and Goals of motion in Homeric and Classical Greek within the frame semantics paradigm. In particular, based on a corpus of 26 works covering four text types, it is shown that (a) regardless of their semantic class, motion verbs display preference for Goal paths compared to Source ones; (b) the frame that a verb belongs to affects the type of path chosen only to a certain degree that does not change the Source-Goal imbalance; (c) semantically incongruent motion verb – path combinations are naturally less frequent than congruent combinations, but within the category of incongruent combinations the tokens are distributed in a way that reflects the prevalence of Goals; (d) the number of markers for the encoding of Goal is higher than that of Source; and (e) Source and Goal markers interact with Place ones in an asymmetrical way: Goal markers come to encode Place and, similarly, Place markers come to express Goal. Conversely, the interaction of markers exhibiting Source-Place polysemy is unidirectional, in the sense that none of these markers was originally used to encode Place alone. Theoretical implications of the study are discussed and directions for future research are suggested.