An instructional account for «on the contrary» based on studies on counterargumentative connectors

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the pragmalinguistic explanation of the English discourse marker on the contrary applying the instructional framework developed by Portolés (2001) for Spanish discourse markers. In order to account for the procedural meaning of this marker, particular attention is paid to his descriptions of the counterargumentative connectors por el contrario, en cambio and al contrario, and to the development of polyphonic instructions (Ducrot 1980, Portolés 2011, Murillo 2016). In the current proposal, on the contrary encodes counterargumentive, informative, and polyphonic instructions, and the main polyphonic configurations are presented and exemplified. A comparison between on the contrary, por el contrario and al contrario is subsequently offered, and some issues for translation are addressed.