Not on my watch and similar not-fragments: stored forms with pragmatic content

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the English idiom Not on my watch, which is a member of a family of both lexically fixed and constructional idioms, including Not if I can help it, Not as long as I … and, as a more distant member, Not in a million years. I argue that in these expressions, not is technically a negative proform referring to a contextually salient proposition and that, at least across conversational turns, it reverses the polarity of that clause. However, attempts to reconstruct Not on my watch as a full clause (e.g. This will not happen on my watch) do not do justice to the fact that this phrase is felt to be a single unit, as is witnessed, moreover, by its capacity to trigger subject-auxiliary inversion (e.g. Not on my watch will you be harmed). Functionally, not on my watch and its close relatives do not just emphatically deny a proposition but many of them are also used as a pledge not to let something happen.