In this article the consideration is given to the phenomenon of negation. Methodologically, the study suggests an alternative to modeling alternations as choices among equally conventionalized expressions, with certain variables predicting others. The rarer variants of negated restrictives have more diffuse usage profiles, which suggests less conventionalization and possible emergent constructions which have not sedimented into stable parts of the language. 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 contrastive correlative not only X but (also) Y construction appears as the central context for negated restrictives in English. The study is based on a dataset of 1599 tokens, annotated for several formal, functional, and extralinguistic variables, and analyzed using hierarchical configural frequency analysis. This study investigates the formal and functional variation 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. 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. When restrictive adverbs are negated, an additive reading is produced (e.g., not only).
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