In Contrast - A Complex Discourse Connective

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based study of the discourse connective “in contrast”. The corpus data are drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) and are analyzed at the levels of syntax, discourse structure, and compositional semantics. Following Webber et al. (2003), the paper argues that “in contrast” crucially involves discourse anaphora and, thus, resembles other discourse adverbials such as “then”, “otherwise”, and “nevertheless”. The compositional semantics proposed for other discourse connectives, however, does not straightforwardly generalize to “in contrast”, for which the notions of contrast pairs and contrast properties are essential.

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