Meanings and Functions of But

Table of Content

1 Introduction
1.1 Usage of but in general
1.2 Functions of but

2 MAterial And Method

3 Results

4 Summary and Discussion

Appendix

Bibliography

1 Introduction

1.1 Usage of but in general

The following facts and deductions are taken from the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. This book is a corpus-based grammatical study whose authors used the British National Corpus and the Longman Spoken American Corpus as their main sources.

(1) I think he will have salad but he doesn’t like tomatoes. (CONV)
(2) A: The golden rule is if you’re reversing you must look behind you!
B: Yeah, but she said she did. (CONV)
(3) A: If perhaps you were to spread erm – a wire netting over the pond Mollie?

B: Well yes I know, but I’m not having that! But erm – what I am going to do but I can’t do it until – the spring. (CONV)^[1]

The registers in the Longman Spoken and Written Corpus are conversation (CONV), fiction (FICT), news (NEWS) and academic prose (ACAD).

This selection of the above sentences supports the theory that the word but is most frequent in conversation (and fiction), and least frequent in academic prose. The high frequency of but can be explained by the high frequency of negatives in conversation. Negation and contrast are closely related topics. Moreover, conversation is interactive. The high frequency in both cases results from this interactivity. “The speaker can use but to modify a statement (1), and the addressee can use it to express a contrary opinion, refute a statement by the interlocutor, reject a suggestion, etc. (2, 3)”. 2

The distribution of but in the other registers is more difficult to explain: One answer to the question of low frequency in academic prose may be that contrast is more often expressed by other words in that register. “Forms such as although, however, nevertheless, and on the other hand are more frequent in academic prose than in the other registers.”3

Another interesting finding is that of but as a sentence/turn-initial coordinator. Although it is said that placing a coordinator at the beginning of an orthographic sentence is not right on the level of style, coordinators are quite frequent in this position in actual texts. But, for example, is very likely to be found in sentence/turn-initial position. But the frequencies are higher in fiction and news reportage than in academic writing. This probably shows that especially dialogue in fiction and quoted speech in news include more spontaneous reactions.

Furthermore, in written texts, sentence-initial coordinators often occur at paragraph boundaries. As can be seen in the following sentences, they create a kind of marked effect:

(4) No indeed, poems were not made out of intentions.

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(5) Had Norwich not defeated Notts County in the fifth round that afternoon, it could have been Mr Stringer’s first and last address to the nation’s footballing public.

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But win Norwich did and they have since gone on to preserve their First Division lives and reach the FA Cup semi-finals. (NEWS), p. 84

In these examples, but does not connect equal clauses or elements, but is more closely connected with the sentence which it introduces. It does not introduce the following structure as a subordinate one, though the coordinator could be seen as an initiator of the following phrase.

1.2 Functions of but

In all the following uses, but has a restricting meaning in the context.

a) but as coordinating conjunction

In general, but links elements (clauses and phrases) which have the same syntactic role.

The position of but as conjunction is fixed to the clause boundary.

b) but as preposition

But as preposition is followed by a noun or pronoun, but no verb form occurs.

(6) Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me. (FICT)^[2]

c) but as adverb

Sometimes but takes on the function of an adverb and, then, has the meaning of only.

(7) Important as sterling is domestically, it is but one arena in the global battle to contain

the dollar. (NEWS)¹

d) but as part of a complex structure

Together with the subordinator that, but forms a complex subordinator expressing exception.

(8) There was no question but that the army, the Lebanese Forces militia, and a whole

wave of volunteers would have put up a desperate resistance. (NEWS)2

Moreover, there are various combinations like, for example, but also, which is a correlative coordinator stressing the meaning of addition, alternative or contrast.

(9) We use not only the colors reflected from mineral surfaces but also the colors

transmitted through minerals in microscopic thin sections. (ACAD), p. 80

The second example is the combination of but and for. These two words form a complex preposition which functions semantically and syntactically as a single preposition.

e) but in spoken language

Bu is a common turn-opener in English dialogue.

(10) A: Whenever you’re ready to take me shopping.

B: But where – are we going shopping? (BrE), p. 1070

2 MAterial And Method

For my research I used the ICE-GB sample corpus which contains 21,809 words and includes spoken and written texts from 1990 to 1993. The spoken and written text category contain five texts each (with about 2,000 words per text).

With the help of the ‘Variable Query’ I was able to search in separate text categories, which was advantageous especially to the investigation of differences in written and spoken English.

The ICE-GB corpus was automatically tagged and parsed by the TOSCA tagger (University of Nijmegen). So, I could explore the results of the ‘Text Fragment Query’ with the help of the ‘Category’ and ‘Features’ function.

There is a printed version of the ‘Text Fragment Query’ of the word but in the appendix.

3 Results

The total frequency of but in the ICE-GB comes up to 104. (The number of different text units in which but appears amounts to 103.)

That means that but occurs with a probability of 0.48% in the sample corpus, thus at least one time in 209 words.

In the following table the distribution of the different functions of but is listed:

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table 1: distribution of different functions of but in the ICE-GB

The table shows that almost two thirds of the uses of but have the function of a connector. This term includes the uses of but as an initiator which is connected with the element which it introduces. Furthermore, all instances found as turn-opener in dialogue are included in this category. In the ICE-GB corpus the function of the connector is also labelled ‘Discourse Marker’.

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^[1] +2+3 Biber, Johansson. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson Education Limited: Harlow/Essex, 1999. 82ff.

^[2] Biber, Johansson. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson Education Limited: Harlow/Essex, 1999. 81