The discourse connectives ao invés and pelo contrário in contemporary European Portuguese

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to characterize the discourse connectives ao invés and pelo contrário in contemporary European Portuguese (henceforth, CEP), and, more specifically, to identify the semantic constraints they impose on the constituents they relate. The analysis will take into account the different syntactic constructions in which they occur and the type of discourse relation they mark. Ao invés marks two different discourse relations: prototypically, a contrastive comparison relation, peripherally, a substitution relation. Pelo contrário may also mark a contrastive comparison, but prototypically it is used in refutation contexts, encoding a rectification discourse relation.