negative circumstantial (sem)

Type meaning
http://example.org/cx/hasExample She carried the punch into the living room without spilling a drop
http://example.org/cx/hasExample She carried the punch into the living room, and she didn't spill a drop!
Definition the semantic relation between two events where one event does not accompany the other event and further characterizes the other event in some way. In this respect, the negative circumstantial relation is a negative version of the means or positive circumstantial relation. Example: She carried the punch into the living room without spilling a drop is a figure--ground construal of the negative circumstantial relation in an adverbial clause construction, and She carried the punch into the living room, and she didn't spill a drop! is a complex figure construal of the relation in a coordinate clause construction. In the figure--ground construal, the non-accompanying event is construed as the ground. (Section 15.3.1)
See section (in Croft 2022) 15.3.1
Function of negative circumstantial construction
Subtype of event relation

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).

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