Abstract
The paper tries to contribute to the semantical characterisation of adversative conjunctions and to the explanation of their distribution with respect to other conjunctions. The starting point is the view that all conjunctions including adversative ones can be characterised as special cases of additive marking and that the distributional pattern follows by simple blocking in which the more specific additive marker blocks a less specific one. While this seems to work, the account of adversative conjunctions like but that results in an additive analysis runs into serious problems. The paper tries to do better by developing an alternative account of adversativity in which but-clauses primarily have the function of marking the rhetorical relation of objection: they mark the fact that the speaker is objecting to a proposal that is contextually given. The paper shows how such an account could still explain the distributional facts.
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