Estudio semántico-pragmático de las relaciones de contraste y sus marcas en lengua inglesa.

Abstract

Contrast is a widely used notion in linguistics. However, its definition remains controversial and few studies have been conducted on the different procedures used to codify it linguistically. This thesis studies how contrast relations are expressed in English written academic texts. The first section reviews studies on contrast and contrast relations (CR) from different linguistic approaches. The difficulty of defining contrast, concession and adversative meaning is acknowledged, as well as that of distinguishing different types of contrast, and the relationship between contrast and other notions (time, condition), both diachronically and synchronically. Previous work on contrastive connectives is then reviewed. It is suggested that more detailed synchronic descriptions of contrastive connectives in real texts may contribute both to a better understanding of the paradigm of contrastive connectives, by explaining the ways in which certain units differ from each other, and to explain the role of such connectives in the process of creating textual meaning and argumentation. Our analysis of the expression of CRs is based on a corpus of linguistics journal articles. It is by studying occurrences of CR and contrast connectives in a specific genre that we shall contribute to broaden the range of textual and rhetorical studies on this notion. A first study explores the ways contrast is expressed in a reduced corpus, showing that contrast involves elements of a different nature (phrases, sentences/propositions, text level) in very different proportions, that the contrasted elements are often implicit (epistemic domain), that a variety of mechanisms are used to express it, and that connectives are the most common devices used to signal it. The second study analyzes how a CR is conceptualized and expressed linguistically by four units, although, while, still and yet. The theoretical framework is adapted to describe the particular uses in our corpus. A semantic-pragmatic analysis of each of them is carried out considering aspects such as the type of contrast, its meaning, the information structure, cooccurrence, correlation, and the rhetorical or discourse function performed. A database allows the analysis of these data separately and in combination with other aspects. Results for each marker are also contrasted globally.