alternative proposition (inf)

Type information packaging
http://example.org/cx/hasExample John bought apples. No, he bought PEACHES
Definition when a contrast situation is construed as an identificational construction, the propositional content is asserted against a background of an alternative proposition (or propositions) expressed or evoked in the discourse context. Example: in the exchange John bought apples. No, he bought PEACHES, the proposition that John bought peaches is asserted against the background of the alternative proposition that John bought apples. The shared part of the proposition and its alternative, that John bought something, is presupposed -- that is, John bought X is a presupposed open proposition. (Section 11.4.1)
See section (in Croft 2022) 11.4.1
Subtype of discourse structure

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.

Back to list of Comparative Concepts