“You have done a great job, but I would make some changes.” Concession and politeness in asynchronous online discussion forums

Abstract

The aim of this study is to provide a preliminary characterisation of concessives in asynchronous online discussion forums and to explore how learners participating in the discussions use concession in combination with other politeness strategies in a collaborative pedagogical context. For this purpose, a corpus of 165 concessive clauses headed by but (henceforth, butCs) was extracted from the English component of the Santiago University Corpus of Discussions in Academic Contexts (SUNCODAC). First, we explored the co-occurrence of butCs with different lexical features (first and second-person pronouns and adjectives, hedges, boosters and positive and negative sentiment words) which have been reported to be important for this categorisation (Hyland 2005; Musi et al. 2018). Then, variations in the frequency of use of these linguistic features were investigated using the Log Likelihood test in relation to different contextual factors: a) message section, b) course period, and c) gender. The results of the quantitative analyses indicate that the typical butC co-occurs with a set of lexical features whose distribution is clearly determined by the discourse function of the two concessive propositions, and by the part of the message in which it appears. Furthermore, the fact that the frequency of all features seems to decrease over time seems to point to an evolution from a more tentative to a more confident tone in posts. The results also confirm the existence of gender-related differences.