let alone construction (cxn)

Type	construction
http://example.org/cx/hasExample	I barely got up in time to eat lunch, let alone cook breakfast
Definition	a negative sentence that expresses two propositions at different degrees of strength in a scalar model; the speaker asserts the most informative of the two propositions, although the less informative proposition is sufficient in the communicative context. Example: in response to the question Did the kids get their breakfast on time this morning?, the sentence I barely got up in time to eat lunch, let alone cook breakfast is an instance of the let alone construction: not getting up in time to cook breakfast would answer the question, but not getting up in time to eat lunch is still more informative (indicating just how long the speaker remained in bed). (Section 17.4.2)
See section (in Croft 2022)	17.4.2
Subtype of	complex sentence

Source

The Model of Comparative concepts for Constructicon Alignment (MoCCA; Lorenzi et al. 2024) proposes to connect constructions across and within languages using Comparative Concepts as a shared base of comparison. It adopts the set of Comparative Concepts provided by Croft (2022).

Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax: Constructions of the World’s Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/morphosyntax/1AAB4F5F9C553F675170DCA3F03F82E2#contents. (14 October, 2025).
Lorenzi, Arthur, Peter Ljunglöf, Ben Lyngfelt, Tiago Timponi Torrent, William Croft, Alexander Ziem, Nina Böbel, Linnéa Bäckström, Peter Uhrig & Ely E Matos. 2024. MoCCA: A Model of Comparative Concepts for Aligning Constructicons. In Proceedings of the 20th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation @ LREC-COLING 2024, 93–98. Torino, Italia: ELRA and ICCL. https://aclanthology.org/2024.isa-1.12/. (22 July, 2025).

You can consult this entry in the original database here.

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