antithesis or contrast

[CSÛRY István PhD]

Hi,

Here is a late comment on a problem discussed in March 2002:

Interpreting contrast-like relations in discourse is difficult if we
consider only text spans / segments appearing "on the surface" and
"physically" connected by a relation marker as BUT, HOWEVER, etc..
What's more, one can simply not give an unambiguous definition of
semantic relations as concession, opposition, etc. without taking into
consideration some "underlying semantic structures". In fact, contrast
(in a general sense of the term) is a polar relation based on two
conceptual entities such that one of them is (conceived as) the negation
of the other. Thus, contrast (opposition, concession...) between
connected text spans / segments is always a manifestation on the surface
of underlying antinomic conceptual relations which are not always
directly accessible but which, in most cases, do not allow "symmetric",
neutral interpretation of surface relations. Otherwise, we could change
the order of text segments without any consequences. And that's not the
case: if we consider the example that Juliano Desiderato Antonio gave,
it's clear that
"He loves the girl BUT her father doesn't want them to date"
and
"The girl's father doesn't want them to date BUT he loves her"
are semantically not equivalent on discourse level since they do not
allow the same continuation. When Manfred Stede says that they have more
or less ruled out contrast because "whenever these things appear in a
context, one of the spans is going to be the  more important one, the
positively regarded one, or the one that's going  to be further
elaborated", I think that it is not necessarily a matter of speaker's /
writer's identification with a given point of view or another: it's a
matter of orientation inherent in expressions of contrast.
I have worked with French corpora and I have found that "pure"
("neutral", "symmetric") contrast -- if it does exist in context -- is
extremely rare.

Regards,
István Csüry

--
CSÜRY István PhD
* Debreceni Egyetem, Francia Nyelv és Irodalom Tanszék / Université de
Debrecen, Département de Français / Debrecen University, Department of
French
* e-mail: csury at delfin.klte.hu
* web: http://www.unideb.hu/~csury/
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