A Grammar of Catalan Sign Language (LSC)

In adversative coordination, differently from conjunction and disjunction, the manual sign but can sometimes be obligatory. In contrastive adversative coordination it is optional (see (a) and (b)).

                                                                  ht-right re, sq                               ht-left, bl-left   ht-right, bl-left

a) giorgia cake chocolate very good but  [fruit cl (5): ‘fruits’+++ burn]_[ipsi].

               ‘Giorgia baked a very good chocolate cake, but burnt a fruit cake.’

(© Alexandra Navarrete-González & Giorgia Zorzi 2019. Reprinted with permission from Navarrete-González & Zorzi, 2019)

 

 

            b) giorgia [cake_a chocolate very good]_[ipsi] [fruit cl (5): ‘fruits’+++_b burn]_[contra].

               ‘Giorgia baked a very good chocolate cake (but) burnt a fruit cake.’ 

(© Alexandra Navarrete-González & Giorgia Zorzi 2019. Reprinted with permission from Navarrete-González & Zorzi, 2019)

                                                                                   

In corrective adversative coordination it is optional, too, as in examples (a) and (b) below.

                                                 re    hs   re, ht-b

                                                ht-right                   ht-right

a) jordi beer cl: ‘drink’ not  but sangria yes.

                ‘Jordi did not drink beer but sangria.’

(© Giorgia Zorzi 2018. Reprinted with permission from Zorzi, 2018b: 139)

 

 

                                                 re      hs                                              bl-right

b) [marina room study not]_[contra] [ix-(loc) garden play]_[ipsi].

               ‘Marina is not studying in her room, she is playing in the garden.’  

(© Giorgia Zorzi 2018. Reprinted with permission from Zorzi, 2018b: 138)

                                                                                              

In counterexpectational adversatives, instead, its absence would cause a lack of contrast between the two conjuncts.  The sentence in (a) below is an example which does not encode the same adversative meaning as (b). The non-manual markers cannot compensate for the missing manual marker.

                                                                                               re

                                                                                            bl-f

a) jordi very-tall but basketball play very-bad.

               ‘Jordi is very tall, but he is very bad at playing basketball.’

(© Giorgia Zorzi 2018. Reprinted with permission from Zorzi, 2018b: 107)

 

                                                fe                               re              bl-f

b) jordi very-tall. basketball play very-bad.

   ‘Jordi is very tall. He is very bad at playing basketball.’

(© Giorgia Zorzi 2018. Reprinted with permission from Zorzi, 2018b: 138)