Abstract

The conjunction aber (≃ but) is said to have meanings such as semantic opposition, denial of expectation, or opposite evaluations. These meanings are sometimes subsumed under one central meaning like ‘contrast’ or ‘concession’. In this paper, some uses of aber will be examined mostly on the basis of the five types of aber and their examples introduced in Breindl (2004), leading to the conclusion that aber is a functional word that instructs an operation in the interpretation of the forthcoming sentence: zooming out and finding out an element out of the set constructed by the previous sentence. With this assumption, we can analyze not only the examples in Breindl (2004), but also sentences in which aber cannot have contrastive meaning in an ordinary sense, e. g., the use of aber in sentences with words whose extensions have an inclusive relationship, or the use of aber in the construction aber ... auch (≃ but ... too). Thus, we claim that this single operative instruction explains the usages of aber more consistently than any previous lexical explanation.