Contraction of negatives as evidence of variance in register-specific interactive rules

This study investigates the contraction of negatives in a carefully chosen corpus of discourse and writing, to permit comparison of the relative influences of various linguistic and social parameters on contraction. Evidence is presented that negative contraction is conditioned by interactional and other register variables. The point is made that the pragmatic as well as morphological interpretation of negatives entails that negative contraction and auxiliary contraction should be distinguished from each other. Although a Cognitive Prominence Principle predicts noncontraction when the negative conveys semantically focal information, a Social Agreement Principle predicts contraction. This is because it would be face-threatening (and, therefore, in conversation analysis terms "dispreferred") to focus on disagreement, which is most often the semantic information conveyed by negatives. This hypothesis is examined using corpora which differ along several dimensions. The most important of these (for this study) appear to be the interactional versus informational register dimensions (Finegan, 1994). Data from instructional (workshop presentations), confrontational (political debates), and casual conversational material are contrasted with comparable reading style materials. The following general results are predicted. The Cognitive Prominence Principle will take over in informational contexts when disagreement is acceptable or neutralized. The Social Agreement Principle will take over in more interactional contexts where disagreement is not acceptable. The results are of interest to the student of focus, the sociolinguist concerned with dialect, register, and style variation, and even the speech technician. From a sociolinguistic perspective, any analysis of linguistic data must consider the influence of the situations of use on variation in given linguistic features; the characteristic pattern for the use of language in a particular situation determines what is now referred to as "register" (Finegan, 1994). Most sociolinguistic studies isolate one social situation to analyze; fortunately, the linguistic variable to be discussed here—contraction—has been analyzed in various registers. The present study takes advantage of previous I would like to thank Manny Schegloff and Gail Jefferson for access to the conversational data and transcriptions, Bea Oshika for access to the SCRL recordings, and Karen Adams for access to the debate data and transcriptions. I would also like to thank Henrietta Cedergren, Molly Diesing, Scott Jacobs, Patti Jo Price, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors for helpful suggestions. Any remaining limitations are clearly to be laid at the door of Malcah Yaeger-Dror, Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. Email: [email protected]