EUN YOUNG PARK (SOGANA UNIVERSITY)
ISAIAH YOO (Sogang University)

IS ON THE CONTRARY REALLY A CONTRANYMIC ADVERBIAL? : ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC/SPECIFIC PURPOSES

Many grammars explain that on the contrary contradicts the proposition expressed in the preceding statement, e.g. City living is supposed to be difficult. On the contrary, I really enjoy the convenience of living in a city (Larson-Freeman & Celce-Murcia, 2015). Lake (2004), however, points out that on the contrary reiterates, not contradicts, the previous statement in examples such as It doesn’t seem ugly to me; on the contrary, I think it’s rather beautiful. Although Lake’s argument is not incorrect, adopting his argument will result in on the contrary being a contranymic adverbial, i.e. an adverbial with two contradictory meanings. By analyzing the tokens of on the contrary retrieved from the Brown Corpus and the Frown Corpus, this paper will show that Lake’s pedagogically confusing explanation of on the contrary can be remedied if we adopt the following explanation: If the preceding statement is a negative one, on the contrary contradicts the proposition that comes after the negative word such as no, not, and never. If the preceding statement is a positive one, the reader has to figure out which proposition is contradicted by determining whether a word, a phrase, a clause, or the entire sentence is contradicted. Therefore, it is actually easier to interpret what’s being contracted if the preceding sentence contains a negative element.

Eun Young Park is a Ph.D. student in English education at Sogang University, Korea. Her research interest includes light verb constructions, grammar as well as the impact of identity, agency, and imagined future-self. Over the past 15 years, she designed and implemented a three-year curriculum based on Communicative language teaching.

Isaiah WonHo Yoo is Professor in the Department of English Literature & Linguistics at Sogang University. His primary research focuses on how corpus linguistics informs language pedagogy. His publications have appeared in Corpora, TESOL Quarterly, the Journal of Second Language Writing, Linguistic Inquiry, and Applied Linguistics.