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On 'nicht...sondern...' (contrastive 'not...but...')

This article presents an analysis of German nicht...sondern... (contrastive not...but...) which departs from the commonly held view that this construction should be explained by appeal to its alleged corrective function. It will be demonstrated that in nicht A sondern B (not A but B), A and B just behave like stand-alone unmarked answers to a common question Q, and that this property of sondern is presuppositional in character. It is shown that from this general
observation many interesting properties of nicht...sondern... follow, among them distributional differences between German 'sondern' and German 'aber' (contrastive but, concessive but), intonational requirements and exhaustivity effects. sondern's presupposition is furthermore argued to be the result of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:1953
Date January 2006
CreatorsKasimir, Elke
PublisherUniversität Potsdam, Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät. Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Source SetsPotsdam University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeInBook
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightshttp://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php

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