Open AccessCorrective Contrast in Russian, in Contrast
Author(s) -
Katja Jasinskaja
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
oslo studies in language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1890-9639
DOI - 10.5617/osla.85
Subject(s) - contrast (vision) , negation , conjunction (astronomy) , linguistics , collocation (remote sensing) , contrastive analysis , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , philosophy , physics , astronomy , machine learning
In many languages markers of contrast, such as the English 'but', are also used to express correction:
John didn't go to Paris, but to Berlin.
The present paper tries to explain this cross-linguistic pattern and represents correction as a special case of contrast. It focuses on the Russian contrastive conjunction 'a' and argues
that its corrective uses in combination with negation 'ne ... a' / 'a ne', which are traditionally viewed as a fixed collocation, are in fact co-occurrences of a general contrastive 'a' with constituent negation.