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The adversative connectives aber and but in conversational corpora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2018

Insa GÜLZOW ,
Victoria BARTLITZ ,
Milena KUEHNAST ,
Felix GOLCHER  and
Dagmar BITTNER
Insa GÜLZOW*
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
Victoria BARTLITZ
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
Milena KUEHNAST
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
Felix GOLCHER
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
Dagmar BITTNER
Affiliation:
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
*
*Corresponding author. Schützenstraße 18, Berlin 10117, Germany. E-mail: guelzow@leibniz-zas.de
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Abstract

We analyzed the conversational corpora of two German and two English children to investigate how the different use types of the adversative connectives aber and but influence the probability of monologically versus dialogically constructed utterances in the first year of use. Our findings show that children produce adversative connectives mainly in dialogic structures for illocutionary and theme-management purposes, but that the use types of adversative connectives lead to a different distribution of monologic and dialogic clause combinations. The results suggest that monologic and dialogic realizations as a function of text type must be considered when describing the developmental trajectory of the different use types of adversative connectives.

Keywords

adversative connectivesmonologuesdialogues
Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 5 , September 2018 , pp. 1212 - 1226
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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