Not on my watch and similar not-fragments: stored forms with pragmatic content

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the English idiom Not on my watch, which is a member of a family of both lexically fixed and constructional idioms, including Not if I can help it, Not as long as I … and, as a more distant member, Not in a million years. I argue that in these expressions, not is technically a negative proform referring to a contextually salient proposition and that, at least across conversational turns, it reverses the polarity of that clause. However, attempts to reconstruct Not on my watch as a full clause (e.g. This will not happen on my watch) do not do justice to the fact that this phrase is felt to be a single unit, as is witnessed, moreover, by its capacity to trigger subject-auxiliary inversion (e.g. Not on my watch will you be harmed). Functionally, not on my watch and its close relatives do not just emphatically deny a proposition but many of them are also used as a pledge not to let something happen.

KEYWORDS:

• English
• constructional network
• emphatic negation
• illocutionary force
• proform
• subject-auxiliary inversion

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the workshop ‘Approaches to fragments and ellipsis in spoken and written English’ (BICLCE2017), the two anonymous reviewers, and the Editor, Peter Juul Nielsen, for insightful and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Of course, all responsibility for remaining inadequacies belongs to me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q06kOyqUoPQ&index=25&list=RDQ06kOyqUoPQ, last accessed 24 September 2018.

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4NAgAIqO4, last accessed 25 September 2018.

³ The quotation marks around killed in the reply are meant to capture the fact that an echoic sort of prosody is required here: the speaker (who utters words of consolation) ascribes the use of killed to the interlocutor (who uttered this word with a hyperbolic interpretation to emphasize his or her desperation).

⁴ That the negation of a proposition renders that proposition cognitively accessible, and thus in fact reinforces it, has been well known since at least Richard Nixon’s unfortunate utterance I’m not a crook at the time of the Watergate scandal. This was also a point Lakoff (2004) made in the title of his book Don’t think of an elephant! See Ducrot (1984), Mœschler (1992) and Nølke (2017), among other works on ‘polysemy’, for the view that the standard function of sentence negation is ‘polemic’, that is, refuting an explicit or implicit proposition.

⁵ http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0409/03/lkl.01.html, last accessed 27 September 2018.

⁶ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Apollo_13_(film), last accessed 27 September 2018.

⁷ As argued by Dennis (2005), the phrase has a nautical origin, referring to the shifts during which an officer has duty on board a ship, being in charge of the vessel and its crew and preventing any accidents or forms of misconduct.

⁸ https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-press-conference-brussels-nato-july-12-2018, last accessed 2 October 2018.

⁹ A search in COCA for “on my watch” yielded 161 tokens. Of these, 19 were irrelevant, as when watch means ‘wristwatch’ (e.g. I went outside, fastening the buckle on my watch as I went). Of the relevant tokens, 37 were clause fragments consisting of Not on my watch and 102 tokens exhibited the use of on my watch as a clause adjunct. In three further tokens, not on my watch occurred as a post-modifier in an NP (e.g. [No animal on my watch] will be put down).

¹⁰ In the following example, it would appear that reference is made to a past rather than a future situation:

(i) So I tailed them with the lights off until I found out what those thieves were after. Money? Jewels? Worms. Those little assholes were stealing worms from the live bait machine. Not on my watch. So I shot em. (COCA)

Yet, on closer examination, Not on my watch here occurs in reported thought. The stealing worms situation that is being referred to is, at the time of the speaker’s thought, an action that is yet about to take place and that, accordingly, can still be prevented from happening at a posterior point relative to that past thought.

¹¹ https://www.italki.com/question/60941, last accessed 2 October 2018.

¹² In the NOW corpus, these are the number of tokens of verb forms used in subject-auxiliary inversion after not on my watch: am/is/are/was/were … going to: 9; will: 5; would: 1.

¹³ Slightly adapted from https://www.simpsonsarchive.com/guides/religion.html, last accessed 4 August 2020.

¹⁴ These examples are quotes from films and TV series and were collected via the website www.getyarn.io, on which I searched for the idioms listed in Huddleston and Pullum (2002, 849) and some other longer but still familiar sequences starting with not. This ‘corpus’ was not designed for linguistic research but is useful in that it is equipped with an auto-fill option so that on typing, for instance, “Not as long as”, there appears a drop-down list of completed sequences. Full quotes in context were looked up in www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk, a website containing full scripts. (Both websites were last accessed on 3 October 2018.) Large corpora of movies and TV shows are currently available via https://www.english-corpora.org. Such corpora contain extremely informal, colloquial English, making them eminently suitable for research into authentic examples of fragments (Davies 2019).

¹⁵ In Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Yoda utters the variant Not if anything to say about it I have, in conformity with the idiosyncratic word order he uses.

¹⁶ Not on your nelly is one more idiom that can function as an emphatic negator. It is not listed in (12)-(16), as the website I used to collect examples did not contain an instance of it. Defined by Oxford Dictionaries (n.d.) as “Certainly not”, this idiom is quite frequently used with subject-auxiliary inversion, as in the following web-attested examples:

(i) a. Not on your nelly am I paying that for a tiny piece of cake.

b. Not on your nelly will I ever cross that threshold again.

c. Not on your nelly are they getting a signature of mine after all the grief they put me in.

¹⁷ As pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, the non-inverted version would also be unacceptable (*They will put any windmill not in my backyard). Unlike the other not-fragments, not in my backyard cannot be reinserted in a full clause and remain a chunk; it has to be split up: They will not put any windmill in my (proverbial) backyard.

¹⁸ https://www.tripadvisor.co.nz/Restaurant_Review-g39214-d4711579-Reviews-Hilligans-Bowling_Green_Kentucky.html, last accessed 21 January 2020.

¹⁹ https://www.readytogo.net/smb/threads/sunderland-vs-peterborough-match-thread.1447466/page-58, last accessed 3 October 2018.

²⁰ https://www.pressreader.com/canada/vancouver-sun/20180927/281681140806694, last accessed 3 October 2018.

²¹ https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6082396/5/Stealing-More-Than-Money, last accessed 3 October 2018.

²² That the non-occurrence of the situation is located in the future is due to the time reference already conveyed by the proposition referred to; see Section 2.2.

²³ https://www.opensubtitles.com/en/subtitles/4294797-a-touch-of-frost-season-05-4-episodes?download=1, accessed 10 August 2020.

²⁴ Brems and Van Linden (2018) make similar observations about No chance! (of which Not a chance!, as we mentioned in Section 3, is a variant) and about No way!. They show that these expressions, when used as fragments, are often used as emphatic negative response items (in the same way as noted here for Not on my watch!) but may also exhibit additional or different functions. In one of its uses, No chance! adds the modal sense of epistemic impossibility (e.g. “I think it’s a grave. A Roman grave,” she said solemnly. … “No chance. If it’s anything at all, it’s one of those red hill things. … ”, where No chance is infused with something like ‘It can’t be a Roman grave’); No way, for its part, can act as a mirative qualifier expressing the speaker’s disbelief or surprise at the preceding utterance (e.g. “A hitchhiker!” said Ellie excitedly. “Yeah, no way,” said Julia). Similarly to Not likely!, both No chance! and No way! can also be used to express that the speaker is unwilling to carry out a certain action when they occur as emphatically negative responses to requests for action. Such expression of unwillingness comes close to taking a pledge that a situation will not be allowed to arise.

²⁵ http://coffeeandcrazy.blogspot.com/, last accessed 24 October 2018.

²⁶ http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/episodes/AABF11.txt, last accessed 31 October 2018.

²⁷ Traugott made this observation in a discussion of independent monoclauses introduced by a subordinator, for example, As if I didn’t know that or Yeah, because you’re so innocent. The underlying mechanism – adding single chunks to previous discourse in spontaneous interaction – appears to be similar across different types of phrases and clauses.:

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Bert Cappelle

Bert Cappelle is an Associate Professor in English linguistics at the University of Lille. He has taught English grammar and linguistics for over a decade and has published scholarly work on particle verbs, modal verbs and various quirky grammatical phenomena. What keeps fascinating him is how the human mind so effortlessly integrates words and structures.