Construções contrastivas com “mas”, Contraste Sintagmático e Elipse do TP

In Portuguese, mas ‘but’ occurs in two different structural constructions, one mainly involving contrast between two non-sentential phrases, Contraste Sintagmático ‘Phrasal Contrast’, and the other contrasting two sentences and presenting ellipsis, TP ellipsis with polarity items. In languages as Spanish and German, contrastive coordination typically correlates two different conjunctions with two constructions exhibiting distinct values, the corrective and the counter-expectation value. Relying on work of the past two decades on adversative coordination with corrective and counter-expectation values, the current paper aims at determining to what extend it is possible to establish a univocal correlation between the values of the adversative coordination and the constructions of Contraste Sintagmático and TP ellipsis in portuguese. It is also our goal to develop a more accurate analysis of these constructions.