A Corpus-Based Approach to English Adversative Coordination

Abstract

What is the difference between and and but? In many sentences, they can be freely interchanged—consider that both ”the weather is sunny and cold” and ”the weather is sunny but cold” are true if and only if the weather is sunny and the weather is cold. What then causes speakers to chose and over but and vice versa? To that end, I gather data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and investigate properties of the distributions of the two conjunctions. I find that and is more unmarked and neutral, while but is more likely to appear when greater contrasts exist between the two conjuncts themselves, or more broadly in more salient contexts. Along the way, novel analyses for the underlying syntactic structure of certain uses of but are proposed.