However, it is common to find in the media phrases such as “The president has replied that he is not in politics to get votes but to achieve benefits for the community”, “At the beginning of 2023 the problem in Venice is not excess of water but drought” or “Residents of a small border town discovered that they were not Mexicans but citizens of the United States.”
According to the Dictionary of the Spanish language, sino is a conjunction that is used ‘to oppose an affirmative concept to a previous negative one’. For its part, the Orthography of the Spanish language indicates that before the coordinated sentences headed by the conjunction, if not, a comma is written. According to this last work, there is an exception to this rule: when but has an approximate meaning of more than, something other than, except, except, apart from, it is not written as a comma: «Who are responsible but (more than) the governments?» and not “Who are responsible, if not the governments?”.
Therefore, in the initial examples, the appropriate thing to do would have been to write “The president has replied that he is not in politics to get votes, but to achieve benefits for the community”, “At the beginning of 2023 the problem of Venice is not the excess water, but drought” and “Residents of a small border town discovered that they were not Mexicans, but citizens of the United States.”
The entrance The use of the comma before but was first published on newspaper TODAY.
