Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vvkck Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T01:51:46.752Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The adversative connectives aber and but in conversational corpora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2018

Insa GÜLZOW ,
Victoria BARTLITZ ,
Milena KUEHNAST ,
Felix GOLCHER  and
Dagmar BITTNER
Insa GÜLZOW*
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
Victoria BARTLITZ
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
Milena KUEHNAST
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
Felix GOLCHER
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
Dagmar BITTNER
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
*
*Corresponding author. Schützenstraße 18, Berlin 10117, Germany. E-mail: guelzow@leibniz-zas.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We analyzed the conversational corpora of two German and two English children to investigate how the different use types of the adversative connectives aber and but influence the probability of monologically versus dialogically constructed utterances in the first year of use. Our findings show that children produce adversative connectives mainly in dialogic structures for illocutionary and theme-management purposes, but that the use types of adversative connectives lead to a different distribution of monologic and dialogic clause combinations. The results suggest that monologic and dialogic realizations as a function of text type must be considered when describing the developmental trajectory of the different use types of adversative connectives.

Keywords

adversative connectivesmonologuesdialogues
Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 5 , September 2018 , pp. 1212 - 1226
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Behrens, H. (2006). The input–output relationship in first language acquisition. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21(1/3), 2–24.Google Scholar
Bittner, D., & Bartz, D. (in press). Finiteness in early but-clauses in German L1-acquisition. First Language.Google Scholar
Blakemore, D. (2002). Relevance and linguistic meaning: the semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K., & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. Journal of Child Language, 7(2), 235–261.Google Scholar
Breindl, E., Volodina, A., & Waßner, U. (2014). Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren, Band 2: Semantik. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
De Beijer, W. (2009). The emergence of Dutch modal and aspectual particles: a comparison between first and second language learners (MA thesis). Radboud University Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Diessel, H. (2004). The acquisition of complex sentences. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Evers-Vermeul, J., & Sanders, T. (2009). The emergence of Dutch connectives: how cumulative cognitive complexity explains the order of acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 36(4), 829–54.Google Scholar
Evers-Vermeul, J., & Sanders, T. (2011). Discovering domains – on the acquisition of causal connectives. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1645–62.Google Scholar
Hall, A. (2007). Do discourse connectives encode concepts or procedures? Lingua, 117(1), 149–74.Google Scholar
Hothorn, T., Bretz, F., & Westfall, P. (2008). Simultaneous inference in general parametric models. Biometrical Journal, 50(3), 346–63.Google Scholar
König, E. (1991). The meaning of focus particles: a comparative perspective. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kyratzis, A., & Ervin-Tripp, S. (1999). The development of discourse markers in peer interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 31(10), 1321–38.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. (1971). If's, and's and but's about conjunction. In Fillmore, C. J. & Langendoen, D. T. (Eds.), Studies in linguistic semantics (pp. 115–49). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Lang, E. (2000). Adversative connectors on distinct levels of discourse: a re-examination of Eve Sweetser's three-level approach. In Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Kortmann, B. (Eds.), Cause, condition, concession, contrast: cognitive and discourse perspectives (pp. 235–56). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lieven, E., Salomo, D., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: a usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics, 20(3), 481–507.Google Scholar
Lustigman, L., & Berman, R. (2016). Form and function in early clause-combining. Journal of Child Language, 43, 157–85.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Miller, M. (1979). The logic of language development in early childhood. Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
Peterson, C. (1986). Semantic and pragmatic uses of ‘but’. Journal of Child Language, 13(3), 583–90.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2015). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Retrieved from <https://www.R-project.org/>..>Google Scholar
Robaldo, L., & Miltsakaki, E. (2014). Corpus-driven semantics of concession: Where do expectations come from? Dialogue & Discourse, 5(1), 1–36.Google Scholar
Rowland, C., & Fletcher, S. (2006). The effect of sampling on estimates of lexical specificity and error rates. Journal of Child Language, 33(4), 859–77.Google Scholar
Sæbø, K. J. (2003). Presupposition and contrast: German aber as a topic particle. In Weisgerber, M. (Ed.), Proceedings of SuB7 (pp. 257–71). University of Constance.Google Scholar
Sanders, T., Spooren, W., & Noordman, L. (1992). Towards a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes, 15, 1–35.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Spenader, J., & Lobanova, A. (2009). Reliable discourse markers for contrast relations. In Proceedings of the 8th international Conference on Computational Semantics (pp. 210–21). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Spooren, W. (1989). Some aspects of the form and interpretation of global contrastive coherence relations (Doctoral dissertation). Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Spooren, W., & Degand, L. (2010). Coding coherence relations: reliability and validity. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 6(2), 241–66.Google Scholar
Spooren, W., & Sanders, T. (2008). The acquisition order of coherence relations: on cognitive complexity in discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40(12), 2003–26.Google Scholar
Sweetser, E. (1990). From etymology to pragmatics: metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, K. (2005). But what do they mean? Modelling contrast between speakers in dialogue signaled by ‘but’ (Doctoral dissertation). University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Weydt, H., Harden, Th., Hentschel, E., & Rösler, D. (1983). Kleine deutsche Partikellehre. Stuttgart: Klett.Google Scholar