A Crosslinguistic Study of Adversative and Corrective Clauses from a Cognitive Perspective

Aber and sondern in German, "danshi" and "ershi" in Chinese, respectively denote adversative and corrective relations, while languages such as English and French use only one conjunction to express these two relations.In the framework of the three-domain theory and the meta-representation theory, it is found that the adversative clause is used in the epistemic domain and the speech-act domain while the corrective clause is only used in the second one.However, they are both at the level of meta-representation and result from subjective inferences or judgements.This is probably one of the reasons why they are represented by only one lexical item in some languages.