Corrective Contrast in Russian, in Contrast

Abstract

In many languages markers of contrast, such as the English 'but', are also used to express correction: John didn't go to Paris, but to Berlin. The present paper tries to explain this cross-linguistic pattern and represents correction as a special case of contrast. It focuses on the Russian contrastive conjunction 'a' and argues that its corrective uses in combination with negation 'ne ... a' / 'a ne', which are traditionally viewed as a fixed collocation, are in fact co-occurrences of a general contrastive 'a' with constituent negation.