Concession in Discourse

Chapter 1. Introduction 3

Chapter 2. Concessive Relations 9
2.1 Concessive, Causal, and Conditional relations 11
2.2 Contrast, Concessive, and Corrective 16
2.3 Concessives on Different Semantic Levels 23
2.4 Contrast and Concessive as a Rhetorical Relation 29

Chapter 3. The Cardinal Concessive 39
3.1 The Cardinal Concessive 39
3.2 Variations on the cardinal Concessive 50
3.3 Functional considerations 58
3.4 Concessive but-constructions in Spoken Discourse 62
3.5 Discourse Functions of Although-constructions in spoken language 71
3.6 Concessive although-vs.but-constructions 80
3.7 Concessive Patterns in Conversation 84

Chapter 4. Synchronic Distribution of English Concessives 91
4.1 The Distribution of though, although, and even though 91
4.2 Functional Interpretation 97
4.3 The Distribution of While 99
4.4 The Distribution of Whereas 101
4.5 The Distribution of however 103

Chapter 5. Concessive as a Discourse Marker 109
5.1 Discourse Marker 109
5.2 Discourse-based Studies for though 112
5.3 Use of though across Positions 116

Chapter 6. Diachronic Developments of Concessives 131
6.1 Literature Review 131
6.2 Grammaticalization Principles 131
6.3 Grammaticalization Mechanisms 146
6.4 Concomitance of Circumstance: though, although, even though 153
6.5 Concomitance of Time: while 165
6.6 Concomitance of Space: whereas 170
6.7 Concomitance of Manner: however 176
6.8 Different Consequences in accordance with Sources 180

Bibliography 186

Appendix 1 202

Appendix 2 203

Index

Introduction

Concession is considered as a conversational strategy for negotiating interlocutors' consensus as well as permitting the exchange in a conversation to be pursued (Weigand and Dascal 2001). Concession in conversation involves typically tripartite sequence of actions: First, one speaker makes a statement or a claim; second, this statement or claim is acknowledged or conceded by another speaker; third, this speaker then advances an apparently contradictory second claim or point. In collaboration these actions accomplish the more global activity of Concession (Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson 1999, 2000).

Concessive is a linguistic term indicating a function word that has meaning similar to anything defined as a concessive subordinator although, while, whereas, concessive coordinator (al) though, but, concessive adverbials nevertheless, nonetheless, even so, still, yet, after all, concessive preposition in spite of, despite, notwithstanding, or concessive parenthetical adverbial expressions true enough, sure enough, admittedly. However, concessive relationships are not necessarily marked by these markers but some sentences may also carry a concessive interpretation without overt concessive markers as in I have to do all this work and you are watching TV (Konig 1985: 2). In this study, analyzing the concessives in English, we will investigate how concession occurs in spoken discourse, in other words, how an interlocutor concedes another claim in conversation.

Concessives develop relatively late in the history of a language and are also acquired much later than other types of adverbial clauses (Konig 1994: 679). Nevertheless, concessives have drawn considerable attention in studies of language change and grammaticalization (Konig 1986; Traugott and Konig 1991; Chen 2000; Barth-Weingarten and Couper-Kuhlen 2002). Since these concessives are known to have developed from lexical sources across languages, looking into the process of emergence of such forms constitutes an interesting research topic for historical linguistics. Against this backdrop, the present investigation will explore the diachronic development of English concessive conjunctions.

The overall approach of the present study is qualitative and quantitative. For a qualitative approach, the current study draws on the concepts formulated in grammaticalization theory which provides a useful framework for an understanding of the historical development of English concessives. The methodology for a synchronic study is essentially quantitative. Naturally occurring data have the principal benefit of being observable and verifiable by all who care to examine it. Corpus-based observations are also intrinsically more verifiable than introspectively based judgements (McEnery and Wilson (2001[1996]: 14). To pursue the goal of corpus-based observation of English concessives, two of corpora are employed: the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). The BNC is a large corpus of modern English (almost 100 million words) which is designed to be a representative sampling of the language as it was used on the British Isles towards the end of the twentieth century. The MICASE consists of approximately 1.8 million words of academic speech from the university, and the speakers represented in the corpus include faculty, staff, and all levels of students, and native, near-native, and non-native speakers.

The present investigation is organized as follows: Chapter 2 discusses characteristics of concessive relations compared with the other discourse relations such as causal, contrast, corrective, and conditional, and also explores the meanings of concessives by applying Sweetser (1990)'s domain theory to them. Chapter 3 investigates how concession is realized or processed in conversation by utilizing Cardinal Concessive Schema (Couper-Kuhlen and Thomson 2000), highlighting the discourse functions of a variety of concessives. Chapter 4 provides a detailed description of present-day use of English concessives with the help of quantative data from present day English on the basis of British National Corpus (BNC). Chapter 5 analyzes the uses of the most frequent concessive though as a discourse marker in spoken discourse. Chapter 6 investigates diachronic developments of English concessive conjunctions, based on the principles and mechanisms of grammaticalization theory.