Concessive Meaning Research Articles

The post-modal grammaticalisation of concessive may and might

Abstract The decline of certain core modals in English, including may and might, is a well-documented phenomenon (cf. Daugs 2017). It is less clear, however, whether this tendency will lead to the loss of these modals or whether other changes are also underway. I aim to address this issue by looking at the use of may and might in concessive clauses. I will first present the results of a corpus study (COHA) aimed at understanding the diachronic development of concessive may and might. The analysis reveals a significant increase of may and might in concessive contexts since the 1960s, especially in factual concessives with but. This new finding is important as it shows that, though decreasing in frequency, the two modals are developing new patterns of use. This raises the question whether the status of may and might as modal verbs is also changing. I argue that the two verbs are going through a process of post-modal (secondary) grammaticalisation and constructionalisation, and that the concessive meaning is linked to the more complex ‘subj {may/might} VP, but-clause’ construction. I also claim that, within the paradigm of concessive constructions, those with may and might are best viewed as hedged concessives that serve politeness purposes.

From temporal to concessive meanings: a semantic analysis of 'still'

We develop a new proposal about the historical connection between the durative and concessive readings of English still and Hebrew ʕadain, a connection that shows striking parallels in the two languages. Building on a corpus study of Hebrew (Rubinstein forthcoming), we argue that durative 'still' precedes the concessive 'still' and that the latter first arises in bridging contexts (and earlier than previously thought). In contrast to previous literature, our proposal places the temporal-to-concessive development squarely in the semantics. We argue that concessive 'still' emerges when an originally durative 'still' gets "infected" with a concessive meaning that is expressed explicitly in the rest of the sentence.

Языковые средства выражения категоричности в современной англоязычной научной прозе

The aim of the paper is to identify the linguistic means of utterance categoricity in modern English-language scientific texts on linguistics. The paper analyzed examples from modern English-language scientific monographs and collections of articles that use categorical utterance techniques, identified the multi-level ways of creating categoricity in a scientific text and assessed their effectiveness in such texts. The study is novel in that it is the first to highlight the techniques and methods of categoricity expression in English-language scientific prose, as well as to summarize the means for achieving maximum impact on the addressee. The results of the study showed that utterance categoricity in an English-language scientific text is of a communicative nature and is determined mainly by the degree of the author’s confidence in the absolute correctness of his/her statements. The categoricity effect in scientific texts can mainly be achieved through the redundancy of information technique, by combining deontic constructions and modal intensifier constructions, the emphatic ‘do’, intensive words and syntactic constructions with the adversative or concessive meaning and the emphatic split construction ‘It is… that’.

Modus concessivus, species concessiva and species affirmativa in the Works of Roman Grammarians

The article aims to analyze the use of the term concessivus/concessiva ‘concessive’ in Latin grammatical texts which make up Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum and Digital Library of late antique Latin texts, and to consider the concessive meaning as a grammatical category. A number of grammatical sources (Probus, Ars of Diomedes, Victorini sive Palaemoni Ars, Ars of Cledonius, Explanationes) place the category of concessivity among the verbal categories, namely modus ‘mood’, while in others this term is not mentioned. The text of Diomedes is also notable for the fact that concessivity is included in the concept of species, a term that includes heterogeneous grammatical phenomena among Roman grammarians. At the same time, the grammarian identifies not one meaning of concession, but two, which are defined by the terms — species concessiva (describes situations that are undesirable for the speaker in the present and future) and species affirmativa (describes situations that did not actually happen). All the three terms in the title of this paper correspond to coniunctivus concessivus and indicate the same grammatical form — perfect subjunctive, e. g. feceris ‘even if you did’. In modern linguistics, the meaning of concession is expressed not only by the perfect subjunctive, but also by the present subjunctive, and, thus, does not have a unique formal expression, as in ancient linguistics. I suppose that concession in the Latin language falls under the scope of covert grammatical category, whereas concession, as it was presented in Roman grammars, can be treated as an overt one.

Onomasiological cyclicity in the expression of concessive relations

In this paper, I discuss processes of language change which have led to the constitution of concessive connectives in two genetically related languages, Latin and Portuguese. I focus on the diachronic developments of the Latin licet, and of bem que and embora, from Portuguese, whose sources are etymologically different: the modal verb licere, the emphatic adverb bem and the volitive adverbial phrase em boa hora. The main purpose is to investigate whether the three phenomena could be taken as stages of an onomasiological cycle of a semantic-pragmatic nature, as proposed by Hansen (2018). Based on studies in Latin linguistics about licet and on the analysis of the grammaticalization processes for bem que and embora in an interactional diachronic sample, I shall argue that, in the three instances of evolution, there has been a stage in which licet, bem and embora have acted as assent markers, and that this usage, in combination with contextual traits, has been crucial to sustain the inferential processes which enabled the concessive interpretation. The similar source and target meanings and the continuity of inferential processes over time also suggest that this is a recurrent path of renewal of the concessive meaning which displays a cyclicity pattern.

A corpus-based analysis of the concessive construction just because X doesn’t mean Y

This study investigates syntactic and semantic features of the English concessive construction just because X doesn’t mean Y (JB-X DM-Y) grounded in Goldberg’s theory of construction grammar. Based on initial data collected from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), our qualitative analysis proved that: (1) syntactically, there should be an unexpressed pronoun it or that serving as the subject of the DM-Y part. The quantitative analysis revealed the productivity of JB-X DM-Y. In terms of vocabulary, just and mean in the construction can be replaced by the adverb simply and verbs indicating inference or making assertions. In terms of structure, JB-X NEG-VP and JB-X NEG-CLAUSE were widely used, and JB-X QUESTION exhibited certain productivity; and (2) semantically, JB-X DM-Y should be seen as the negation of the construction Y, because X. It presented the meaning of inference denial and concessive meaning, corresponding to the inferential-because construction and causal-because construction. This article provides a systemic discussion about JB-X DM-Y and hopes to provide a basic structure for the future analysis of JB-X DM-Y.

The encoding of irrelevance in discourse: tanto between concession and justification

he paper sets out to investigate the linguistic expression of irrelevance in discourse, by focusing on the functions and uses of the marker tanto in present-day Italian. The marker encodes the irrelevance of a given condition, thus conveying a concessive meaning not distant from the value expressed by concessive conditionals or ‘no matter’ predicates. In the construction [p, tanto q], the marker tanto conveys the fact that q holds in any case, namely whether p, non-p, or any value of p is the case. After discussing how the notion of irrelevance has been treated in the literature on conditionals, concessives and predicates of indifference, we will discuss the results of a corpus-based study on spoken Italian, identifying and annotating all the occurrences of irrelevance-tanto. We will show that irrelevance may be expressed by a number of different discourse patterns, explicitly mentioning the irrelevant proposition, the null-effect and the motivation for irrelevance, or omitting one or more of these components. It will be argued that the cases in which speakers simply refer to the irrelevance of a given proposition are rare in our sample, whereas it is more frequent that they also mention the motivation underlying irrelevance, justifying their indifference and thus crucially acting at the intersubjective level. We will show, indeed, that tanto may also be used alone as a discourse marker encoding the speaker’s attitude of indifference: in these cases, tanto is pronounced with suspensive intonation, and subsumes under its semantics the adversative, justificative, and indiscriminative value, activating meanings that speakers are supposed to share.

THE FATE OF THE BULGARIAN WORD ДЕТО IN SLOVENE LITERARY TRANSLATIONS

The aim of the article is to determine and to analyse translation equivalents of the Bulgarian lexical item дето in Slovene translations of five Bulgarian novels. After the introductory overview of the uses of дето (with a contrastive Bulgarian-Slovene perspective) and the functional-semantic analysis of all the occurrences of дето (including само дето and освен дето) in the novels analysed, their Slovene translation counterparts were extracted and analysed functionally, semantically, as well as quantitatively. The most frequent function of дето in the analysed novels is that of the absolute relativizer, followed by дето as a causal and a locative conjunction, and a relativizer with a concessive meaning; дето is also a part of two complex conjunctions, with само дето indicating limitation-contrast or unfoundedness, and освен дето signalling limitation. In addition, дето is found in the parenthetical clause дето се казва ‘as the saying goes’. The translation equivalents show a higher diversity in comparison with the source text forms. Bulgarian дето, само дето and освен дето have – within separate functional-semantic categories – a broad array of functional-semantic, lexical and structural Slovene translation equivalents: pronouns (mainly relative), various conjunctions, omissions, modal particles, adverbs, and clauses. The analysis has shown that дето (with само дето and освен дето) does not have an analogous lexical counterpart in Slovene. Moreover, translators frequently depart from the semantic, syntactic and stylistic features of the source text.

CAUSAL RELATIONS IN ENGLISH NEWS MAGAZINE DISCOURSE: JOURNALISTS’ AGE PERSPECTIVE

This paper reveals how journalists’ age influences the linguistic representation of causal relations in English news magazine articles. Treating cause in a broad sense covering adverbials and clauses of reason, concession, purpose and result, the study finds that causal relations are scarce in the texts of young reporters. Unlike them, middle-aged authors’ articles demonstrate a 17-per-cent-higher frequency of adverbials and clauses of reason, and older journalists’ texts show a 12-per-cent rise in concessive clauses with the temporal concessive, comparative concessive, alternative concessive, conditional concessive and generalizing concessive relations. To account for these findings, I apply Talmy’s (1985) force dynamics theory viewing cause as an interaction of entities concerning force and energy where one causes another. Given this theory, middle-aged journalists verbalise causal relations grounded in what I call energy transfer model with one moving entity causing another to move, and energy loss model where inactivity of one entity is due to blocking of the other entity. In older authors’ articles, causal relations are represented by concessive clauses introduced by a range of conjunctions specifying concessive meaning: temporal concessive, comparative concessive, alternative concessive, conditional concessive and generalizing concessive.

｢V(-タ)トコロデ｣の逆接の意味と構文的制約 ― 時間節との関係を中心に ―

｢V(-タ)トコロデ｣の逆接の意味と構文的制約 ― 時間節との関係を中心に ―

｢V(-タ)トコロデ｣の逆接の意味と構文的制約 ― 時間節との関係を中心に ―

｢V(-タ)トコロデ｣の逆接の意味と構文的制約 ― 時間節との関係を中心に ―

｢V(-タ)トコロデ｣の逆接の意味と構文的制約 ― 時間節との関係を中心に ―

｢V(-タ)トコロデ｣の逆接の意味と構文的制約 ― 時間節との関係を中心に ―

Inferential structures in old Romanian. The conditional and the concessive

The present study aims to highlight the fact that the conditional and concessive periods are two forms of manifestation of the hypothetical-deductive reasoning at the level of natural language. The evolution of the connectors has been described in diachrony, sometimes with the emphasis of the interference zones, with the semantic values imposed by the modal component of the predicativity and by the contextual determinism. The evolutionary analysis of the connectors has highlighted the fact that the old Romanian language, in order to impose the concessive procedural meaning, owns, like the other Romanic languages, a great area of creativity, but, unlike them, it also exercises its conservative character. The conception of the two syntactic relations as variants of the same system, studies the stylistic projection (the paradox and the oxymoron), the semantic and formal relation of the connectors and the implication of the adversative coordinating connectives in the polarization of the oppositions in the old Romanian language.

Clauses with Alternative Concessive Meaning in Contemporary Serbian Language

Clauses with Alternative Concessive Meaning in Contemporary Serbian Language

Influence of Concessive and Causal Conjunctions on Pragmatic Processing: Online Measures from Eye Movements and Self-Paced Reading

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye movement and self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like “NPHUMAN moved from place A to place B, {because (因为 yinwei) /although (尽管 jinguan) /no conjunction} + pronoun (he/she) + verb (e.g., like) + there (nali)… + NP”. The eye-movement data (Experiment 1) recorded from regions of interest consistently showed that the processing of concessive meaning is much slower than the processing of causal meaning, irrespective of whether the causal relation is explicitly coded through a causal marker (i.e., yinwei [because]) or not. In particular, although sentences containing pragmatic anomalies were processed more slowly than sentences containing no pragmatic anomalies in causal structures, there was no such distinction in concessive structures, indicating that the processing of a concessive relation can override that of a pragmatic incongruence. Moreover, although the initial place was reread more in cases of concessive structures as compared with causal structures in region 1 (e.g., place A), there was no difference between them in region 2 (e.g., place B). The results from self-paced reading (Experiment 2) showed that the difficulties observed from processing concessive compared with causal relations were not caused by the difference in pronoun resolution. These findings suggest that processing concessive meaning is cognitively more demanding than processing causal meaning, a conclusion that is also supported by a fine-grained linguistic (i.e., conceptual and pragmatic) analysis of causal and concessive relations.

Verbal inflectional morphology and modality in compound clause-linkage markers in Japanese

Japanese has many compound clause-linkage markers (hereafter “CLMs”). Some of them consist of a verbal inflectional suffix and (up to three) particles. They include eleven compound CLMs that have the Concessive conditional meaning (‘even if’) and/or the Concessive meaning (‘even though, although’). In these eleven compound CLMs, different inflectional categories of verbs (i.e. conjugational categories) combined with different particles indicate different degrees of the speaker’s belief or confidence regarding the likelihood of the existence or occurrence of a situation. That is, verbal inflectional morphology plays a crucial role in expressing modal meanings. Such a phenomenon does not seem to have been recognized for Japanese or any other language.

Interpreting 都 to 1 TO in earlier Southern Min texts

The paper explores the polyfunctional word 都 to 1 TO in early Southern Min texts dating back to the sixteenth century or even earlier. Unlike 都 dou 1 in Mandarin, which mainly functions as a maximality operator, 都 to 1 in Southern Min is chiefly used as a modal particle expressing a concessive meaning or meaning of unexpectedness as a type of conventional implicature rather than pragmatic inference. However, it can be identified as expressing maximality and exhaustivity in construction with wh-words and negation. In a nutshell, the concessive sense is taken as the default sense unless it is overridden by the interpretation of 都 to 1 as a maximality operator. I will examine the syntactic and semantic properties of 都 to 1 based on these texts. Its interpretation hinges on the structural position it occupies and the collocates it interacts with.

Syntactic idioms across languages: corpus evidence from Russian and English

This paper considers the issues of compositionality, concessive meaning, negative polarity, scalarity, linguistic anthropocentricity, and semantics—syntax interaction in a corpus study of the concessive syntactic idiom pri vsem X-e ‘with all X’ in Russian and its non-idiomatic counterpart with all X in English. The study demonstrates (a) both compositional and non-compositional components in the Russian idiom on both syntactic and semantic levels; (b) strong correlation between the semantic and syntactic properties of the idiom; (c) semantic properties typical of other syntactic idioms (such as negative polarization); (d) pragmatic properties that are typical of other syntactic idioms (such as entailments incorporating implicit scales and anthropocentric evaluation); (e) language-specific idiomatic status, which cannot be predicted compositionally and needs to be established on an individual basis, even when a seemingly identical item is present in the two languages under comparison.

The kono … noni construction: A semantic, syntactic and pragmatic analysis

Abstract This study examines the kono … noni construction from semantic, syntactic and pragmatic dimensions. It suggests that this construction as a whole expresses a concessive meaning of an unexpected event happening in a temporary and generally perceived adverse situation which the speaker is currently in. It proposes common semantic characteristics of the adjectives that are allowed to occur in this construction, clarifies the function of the proximal demonstrative kono, which expresses a sense of personal connection to an event, and shows the compositional nature of noni, in which no denotes a duration within this construction. It also suggests that speaker disapproval is strongly associated with the construction, while such meaning is not inherent in the construction itself.

Discourse markers and modality in spoken Catalan: The case of (és) clar

The present paper illustrates the fuzzy limits between modality markers and discourse markers by analysing the different uses based on the word clar ‘clear’ in oral Catalan. Clar is lexically described as an adjective, but it has developed different functions in various syntactic and pragmatic contexts. In the adverbial and the interjective uses, (és) clar (que) ‘it is clear that’ is a modality marker indicating certainty and shared knowledge. As a conjunction, clar que has developed a concessive meaning (‘but, nevertheless’). When (és) clar acts as a discourse marker (i.e. introducing an utterance) it can be an effective mitigation device used to soften a potentially face-threatening act by showing agreement, solidarity and co-orientation in argumentation. Its basic modal meaning (‘it is obvious’, ‘I agree’), shared to a different extent with the adverb and the interjection, tends to be enriched with structural functions, as turn initiator or boundary marker inside a turn. To account for the polyfunctionality of (és) clar (que), a cline from prototypically modal functions to prototypically structural functions is proposed—the intermediate area being occupied by the marker use.