Remarks on the Corrective But Construction

This paper discusses the two types of corrective but construction in English: the anchored form and the basic form (McCawley 1991, 1998). Toosarvandani (2013) claims that the anchored form (e.g., John didn’t drink coffee, but tea) invariably involves vP-coordination and vP-ellipsis. However, challenging this claim, we argue that the derivational possibilities of the anchored form are contingent on the types of negation. In particular, we show that while the anchored form with constituent negation can involve vP-coordination in certain contexts, the one with sentential negation cannot. In line with previous analyses (McCawley 1998, Park et al. 2021a, Vicente 2010), we further demonstrate that the anchored form can involve coordination of larger constituents such as TP and T’, to which certain ellipsis processes apply (such as clausal ellipsis and Left-Edge Ellipsis). Regarding the basic form (e.g., John drank not coffee but tea), we argue that it can also involve TP and T’-coordination and can be derived in the same way as the anchored form. However, irrespective of the type of negation, it cannot involve vP-coordination, unlike the anchored form. Our discussion of the two types of the corrective but construction has certain implications for identity/recoverability on ellipsis. Observing that negation can be disregarded for the purpose of identity/recoverability, we suggest that this effect arises from a unique restriction in the corrective but construction, one that requires both conjuncts to bear opposite polarity.