<i>Not</i>-fragments and negative expansion

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