The adversative connectives aber and but in conversational corpora

We analyzed the conversational corpora of two German and two English children to investigate how the different use types of the adversative connectives aber and but influence the probability of monologically versus dialogically constructed utterances in the first year of use. Our findings show that children produce adversative connectives mainly in dialogic structures for illocutionary and theme-management purposes, but that the use types of adversative connectives lead to a different distribution of monologic and dialogic clause combinations. The results suggest that monologic and dialogic realizations as a function of text type must be considered when describing the developmental trajectory of the different use types of adversative connectives.