Contrast: Adversative and Concessive Relations and Their Expressions in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese on Sentence and Text Level (Research in Text Theory)

This book analyses Noah Webster's and Samuel Johnson's use of verbal examples in their dictionaries as a means of giving guidance on word usage. The author's major interest lies in elucidating how uniquely Webster, who was originally a grammarian, made use of verbal examples. In order to achieve this purpose, the author provides chapters based on types of entry words in their functional contexts. Johnson's selection of sources of citations and the frequency of his quoting citations tended to vary strongly according to the type of entry word; he also supplied invented examples rather than citations when he thought it especially necessary to clarify the use of a word. By contrast, with the exception of biblical ones, almost all of Webster's citations were taken from Johnson's »Dictionary«. However, Webster significantly made full use of such citations to express his view on word usage, which differs essentially from Johnson's. Besides, Webster had a strong tendency to quote phrases and sentences from the Bible for the same purpose. Preface Contents Introductory Remarks 1. Contrast, its linguistic manifestation and investigations Part One — Theory 2. Considerations on the theoretical basis Part Two — Survey of Research 3. The connection of contrast in grammars 4. Investigations of adversative relations 5. Investigations of concessive relations Part three — Functional types General remarks on the functional types of the connection of contrast 6. Adversative contrast expressed by the main adversative connectives 7. Other adversative connectives 8. Concessive contrast Part Four – Additional Observations 9. Special syntactic and/or semantic questions Final Remarks 10. Contrast and some of its aspects 11. Bibliography 12. Index Contrast is one of those general conceptions we all are acquainted with, everyone having particular experiences and images correlated with it. By Elisabeth Rudolph. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes.