Not-fragments and negative expansion

Abstract

This paper focuses on emphatic sentence fragments of the type Not in a million years!. While such fragments can be partially accounted for by a known type of ellipsis, namely ‘stripping’, it is argued here that this type is best treated as a construction in its own right, with formal, semantic and pragmatic properties specific to it. One useful concept is what could be called ‘negative expansion’. This is a discourse-level construction whereby an already negative clause is followed by one or more negative clause fragments, whose negation is a repetition, rather than cancellation, of the negation in the preceding clause, as in It will never happen. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.