Four Types of But

3rd November 2017 / by James Tauber

In his talk on adversive conjunction in Gothic at the 29th UCLA Indo-European Conference, Jared Klein started with a wonderful example paragraph in English.

In order to finish the project, I don't need money but2 time. I would like to be done by the end of this year, but3 I don't think that is going to happen. Nobody is to blame for this but1 me, because I've wasted a lot of time on things that have proved to be irrelevant. But4 this is too depressing; let's talk about something else.

He went on to talk about the Gothic equivalents for each but I thought it was a great illustration of four distinct types of adversatives all using “but” in English.

Klein didn’t necessarily use the following terms but the four could be described as:

  1. prepositional
  2. phrasal
  3. clausal
  4. discourse

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J. K. Tauber

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By day I’m an entrepreneur, web technologist and open-source developer but my academic background is in linguistics (along with some classics, comparative philology, and educational statistics) and my main avocation is working on text, annotations, analysis and software relating to historical languages with a particular interest in facilitating better learning.

While my focus has mostly been on Biblical Greek, much of the work is highly relevant to other Hellenistic Greek texts, other dialects of Ancient Greek and, indeed, texts in completely different languages as well.

All code written for this endeavour is open source and text and data is made available under a Creative Commons license to the extent allowed by the sources used.

I can be contacted at jtauber@jtauber.com.

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