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 effect sondern presupposition is furthermore argued to be the result of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures.

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Metadaten
Author:Elke Kasimir
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1112475
URL:http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2008/1953/
ISBN:978-3-939469-41-4
Parent Title (German):Interdisciplinary studies on information structure / Ishihara, S., M. Schmitz, and A. Schwarz (eds.) ; Working Papers of the SFB 632, Interdisciplinary studies on information structure (ISIS) ; Vol. 5
Publisher:Univ.-Verl.
Place of publication:Potsdam
Document Type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Year of Completion:2006
Year of first Publication:2006
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2008/11/06
Tag:contrast; correction; metalinguistic negation; negation; presupposition
Page Number:45
First Page:107
Last Page:151
Source:Working Papers of the SFB632, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS), 5, 2006, S. 107-151 ; http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2008/1953/
HeBIS-PPN:207964440
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht