The expression let alone, starting to be used as an NPI (negative polarity item) in the 1760s, displays peculiar syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties that are quite unpredictable from general grammar rules. This paper investigates these grammatical properties further while referring to the attested data extracted from corpora like COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). It also discusses several challenges to the postulation of clausal sources and application of move-and-delete operations. The paper then sketches a discourse-oriented construction approach that could offer a more feasible account for its general as well as idiomatic properties. In particular, it shows how the construction in question is interrelated with other related constructions such as parenthetical subordinating clauses modifying a nonveridical situation as well as ellipsis constructions that require a parallelism condition between an ellipsis clause and its antecedent clause.
1. Introduction
2. Key grammatical properties
3. Move-and-delete approaches
4. A construction-based non-derivational approach
5. Conclusion
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