Emergent correlative concessivity: The case of German zwar aber ‘true but’

Abstract

While concessives are well-known for their special semantic characteristics, most research has so far been oriented towards hypotactic construction types (although etc.). The present article seeks to complement this trend by investigating the paratactic zwar … aber-construction in German (roughly equivalent to English ‘true … but’), with a special focus on its patterns of variation. The aim is to document important aspects of this variation from a combined qualitative/quantitative perspective. The basic thesis is that zwar … aber constitutes the core instantiation of an emergent constructional schema zwar … aber whose surface variation is structured in a prototype-like fashion. Several functional regularities and statistical correlations are analysed and discussed from the point of view of grammaticalisation theory. The data consist of ca. 10,000 parsed tokens of zwar, mainly from newspaper usage, in the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo).