Syntactic and Semantic Analyses on English Contrastive Conjuncts in Magazine Articles

Abstract

The aims of this study are describing and analyzing the kinds of contrastive conjuncts, the discourse units connected by the conjuncts, and their meanings found in Discover and National Geographic Magazine articles. This study employed descriptive qualitative method. The grand theory of conjunct proposed by Quirk et al.’s (1985) is used as theoretical framework in analyzing the data. The results of the study showed that there are four kinds of contrastive conjuncts found in the Discover and National Geographic magazine articles. They are reformulatory, replacive, antithetic, and concessive contrastive conjunct. The contrastive conjuncts can connect different sizes of discourse units. They connect sentence with sentence, sentence with larger unit (several preceding sentences), and connect subordinate clause to main clause. For the meanings of the contrastive conjuncts, they are fully determined by their own types. It implies that in determining the contrastive conjunct meanings, we should consider their types as well as the context and relationship between discourse units connected by them.

Keywords: contrastive conjuncts, syntactic and semantic analyses, magazine articles