Not…Until across European Languages: A Parallel Corpus Study

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.

Generating semantic maps through multidimensional scaling: linguistic applications and theory

“…Examples of parallel corpora that have been used in MDS analyses include Bible corpora ( Wälchli 2010 , 2016 , 2018 ; Wälchli and Cysouw 2012 ), translation corpora of novels ( Verkerk 2014 ; van der Klis et al. 2021 ), Europarl (translated proceedings of the European parliament; de Swart, Tellings et al. 2021 ; van der Klis et al.…”

“…Two ongoing research projects in which this approach has been taken are de Swart et al. (2021) and Tellings (2021) , both based on Europarl data.…”

“…(2021) and Tellings (2021) , both based on Europarl data. de Swart et al. (2021) use MDS to study cross-linguistic variation in the compositional interaction between negation and the lexical choice of connective in NPI constructions such as English not…until .…”

Linear Lengthening in Iwaidja: An Event-Quantifying Intonation at the Phonology to Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

“…The idea that event predicates are associated with 'typical duration' is not novel, and has been elaborated upon, and even formalised, in past works, including, e.g., Wyngaerd (2001), Tatevosov (2008) and Gyarmathy (2015), among others; see also de Swart et al (2022) in this issue, for a detailed crosslinguistic analysis of other durative expressions. Tatevosov (2008) thus proposed to formalise the notion of typical duration (TD), as in (30), where |τ (e)| notes the duration of the temporal trace of event e. Note that we are assuming TD to be contextually evaluated with respect to the speaker's current beliefs and knowledge base; it is therefore a subjective and contextual standard of comparison-not an intersubjective, immutable standard.…”