The structure "or not~"

Question

Many European socialist parties went through splits on the basis of the adhesion or not to the new International. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Section_of_the_Workers_International (SFIO) thus broke away with the 1920http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tours_Congress, leading to the creation of the new http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Communist_Party (initially called "French Section of the Communist International" - SFIC); the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CommunistParty_of_Spain(main) was created in 1920, thehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Italy was created in 1921, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Communist_Party in September 1921, etc.

<Source: "Second World Congress" of "Communist_International" in WIKIPEDIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International>

I'd like to know what the structure "or not~" means in my examples.
Thank you in advance for your help.

GPY · Accepted Answer

... on the basis of whether or not party members adhered to ...

CalifJim · Answer

park sang joonon the basis of the adhesion or not to the new International.

Some of the parties in question split into two parts. One part adhered to (believed in, accepted) the new International. The other part did not adhere to the new International.

CJ

Park sang joon · Answer

Thank you, GPY and Mr.Jim, for your very helpful answer.

Then, I'd like to know if I myself can use "A or not~" in lieu of "whether or not A"

1. It depends on whether or not you did that.
2. It depends on your having done or not that.

GPY · Answer

park sang joonThen, I'd like to know if I myself can use "A or not~" in lieu of "whether or not A"

You cannot substitute one directly for the other. The possibility of expressing the idea using "A or not" would depend on finding a paraphrase that worked in the given context.

park sang joon2. It depends on your having done or not that.

That is ungrammatical. "It depends on your having done that or not" would, I suppose, be grammatical, but it is not a good sentence, and it isn't very clear what it should mean.

CalifJim · Answer

park sang joonThen, I'd like to know if I myself can use "A or not~" in lieu of "whether or not A"

It seems to me you'll need a deverbal noun to do that (like 'adhesion', from the verb 'adhere'), and even then, there's no guarantee that all such nouns will work. The construction is probably limited to some subset of nouns derived from verbs with a special semantic property.

And then, even if you find such nouns, and they work, you have to find some rather literary context to put them in. These constructions are not likely to show up often in everyday conversations.

It all depends on his agreement or not with the plan. (agreement from agree)
We cannot make a decision until there is a definite discovery or not of the minerals we wish to extract from the mine. (discovery from discover)
The scientists waited to see the division or not of the cells by which they could determine if they had a cure for the disease. (division from divide)

It seems to me that "or not" is frequently placed within parentheses in these constructions.

I must say that most of these are rather clumsy, so I don't recommend scouring the vocabulary of English to find examples.

CJ

Park sang joon · Answer

I'm sorry for my tardiness, but I'd like to ask one more thing.

1. It all depends on his agreement or not with the plan.
1+. It all depends on whether he agrees with the plan or not.
2. We cannot make a decision until there is a definite discovery or not of the minerals we wish to extract from the mine.
3. The scientists waited to see the division or not of the cells by which they could determine if they had a cure for the disease.
3+. The scientists waited to see whether the cells divide or not by which they could determine if they had a cure for the disease.
I wanted to rephrase the phrase "A or not~" to the clause "whether A or not."
I could rephrase #1 to #1+, #3 to #3+, but I couldn't with #2.
So, I'd like to know how I should rephrase #2.

CalifJim · Answer

park sang joonI'd like to know how I should rephrase #2.

OK. Let's see what we can do with that one. It looks tricky.

We cannot make a decision until there is a definite discovery or not of the minerals we wish to extract from the mine.

We can't decide until we see whether or not the minerals we wish to extract are (definitely) discovered.
We can't decide until we see whether the minerals we wish to extract are (definitely) discovered or not.

That's how I'd do it, but in the second one the "or not" gets pretty far away from 'whether' so I prefer the first sentence.

CJ

The structure "or not~"

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