In his talk on adversive conjunction in Gothic at the 29th UCLA Indo-European Conference, Jared Klein started with a wonderful example paragraph in English.

In order to finish the project, I don't need money but2 time. I would like to be done by the end of this year, but3 I don't think that is going to happen. Nobody is to blame for this but1 me, because I've wasted a lot of time on things that have proved to be irrelevant. But4 this is too depressing; let's talk about something else.

He went on to talk about the Gothic equivalents for each but I thought it was a great illustration of four distinct types of adversatives all using “but” in English.

Klein didn’t necessarily use the following terms but the four could be described as:

  1. prepositional
  2. phrasal
  3. clausal
  4. discourse