'He's nice but Tim': contrast in British newspaper discourse

Abstract

Contrast is not only “one of those general conceptions we all are acquainted with” (Rudolph 1996: 3), it is also an important notion in linguistics both for studies of information structure (e.g. Chafe 1976, Umbach 2004) and for studies of discourse structure (e.g. de Hoop & de Swart 2004, Umbach 2004, Couper-Kuhlen & Kortmann 2000). However, such studies often seem to focus more on the semantics than on the discourse functions of contrast, and corpus-based research still appears relatively rare (but see Rudolph 1996, Salkie & Oates 1999). By contrast, this paper uses a specialised corpus of newspaper discourse as the basis for an analysis of the distribution and discourse functions of but, concentrating on its evaluative function.