Abstract
We present a parallel corpus study on the expression of the temporal construction ‘not…until’ in a sample of European languages. We use data from the Europarl corpus and create semantic maps by multidimensional scaling, in order to analyze cross-linguistic and language-internal variation. This paper builds on formal semantic and typological work, extending it by including conditional constructions, as well as connectives of the type as long as. In an investigation of 7 languages, we find that (i) languages use many more different constructions to convey this meaning than was expected from the literature; and (ii) the combination of polarity marking (negation/assertion) strongly correlates with the type of connective. We corroborate our results in a larger sample of 21 European languages. An analysis of clusters and dimensions of the semantic maps based on the enlarged dataset shows that connectives are not randomly distributed across the semantic space of the ‘not…until’-domain.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 56 |
| Number of pages | 33 |
| Journal | Languages |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Mar 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Funding: This research was funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), grant number 360-80-070.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Keywords
- Compositionality
- Cross-linguistic variation
- Linkage
- Multidimensional scaling
- Polarity
- Temporal connectives