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When restrictive adverbs are negated, an additive reading is produced (e.g., not only). This is particularly common in correlative constructions with a corrective part optionally introduced by but (e.g., not just in England but also in Scotland), but can also appear in other syntactic contexts. This study investigates formal and functional variation in the use of the four most common variants of negated restrictives (not only, not just, not simply, and not merely) from the perspective of constructional and usage-based approaches to language. The study is based on a dataset of 1599 tokens, annotated for formal, functional, and extralinguistic variables, and is analyzed using hierarchical configural frequency analysis. The contrastive correlative construction not only X but (also) Y appears as the central grammatical context for negated restrictives in English. In addition to its high frequency, not only displays the least variability in both form and function, which suggests a high degree of conventionalization. The less frequent variants of negated restrictives have more diffuse usage profiles, suggesting they are less conventionalized and may be emergent constructions which have not yet conventionalized into stable parts of the language. Methodologically, the study suggests an alternative to modeling alternations, which enables the detection of different degrees of conventionalization and which avoids conceptualizing alternations as choices conditioned by independent variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a comparative investigation of contrastive negation in English and Finnish, i. e. combinations of a negated and an affirmed part construed as alternatives to one another. In both languages, there are several constructions that express contrastive negation, but their division of labour remains unclear. The aims of the paper are two-fold: first, to see what constructional strategies are available for contrastive negation in the two languages and, second, to see how the strategies are motivated by its interactional functions. In English, contrastive negation may be expressed by using the adversative conjunction but correctively (e. g. It's not the bikers but the other vehicle on the road), whereas standard Finnish has a specialised corrective conjunction vaan alongside the adversative mutta. Moreover, many constructions can express contrastive negation, including ones without a conjunction (e. g. It's not the bikers, it's the other vehicle on the road). An analysis of conversational data shows that English favours constructions without conjunctions, while in Finnish constructions both with and without conjunctions are frequent. The uses of contrastive negation are divided into reactive and non-reactive. The pragmatic functions largely explain the usage patterns, and these in turn can explain the cross-linguistic regularities of corrective conjunctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]