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Part of
Empirical Studies of the Construction of Discourse
Edited by Óscar Loureda, Inés Recio Fernández, Laura Nadal and Adriana Cruz
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 305] 2019
► pp. 151–192

Chapter 6
A corpus-based comparative study of concessive connectives in English, German and Spanish

The distribution of although, obwohl and aunque in the Europarl corpus

| Friedrich Schiller University Jena

This contribution presents a comparative, corpus-based study of the arguably most common concessive connectives of English, German and Spanish, i.e., although, obwohl and aunque. Concessive connectives cover a broad range of contexts and the question arises to what extent prima facie equivalents such as the three connectives under analysis in this study differ with respect to parameters of concessivity identified in the relevant literature. The study shows that obwohl differs significantly from aunque and although in exhibiting a strong bias towards ‘canonical’ concessivity, while the latter connectives (aunque to a greater extent than although) are also commonly used in non-canonical, specifically ‘relativizing’ concessives. Some further distributional differences are identified (with respect to the level of linking, the givenness status and the topic-comment structure of the concessive), but they are largely consequences of the asymmetries in the ‘basic’ type of semantic relation (canonical, relativizing, adversative). As far as structural properties of the concessive clauses are concerned, obwohl-clauses differ from although- and aunque-clauses in that they rarely precede the main clause. This tendency cannot be explained in terms of length, or the functional parameters under investigation, and is thus regarded as a property of the connectives themselves.

Keywords: concessivity, adversative, relativizing, rich annotation, information structure, position of subordinate clause
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and annotation
  • 3.Theoretical background: Concessivity
    • 3.1A probabilistic definition of concessivity
    • 3.2Concessives vs. adversatives
  • 4.Functional types of concessives: Variables for the empirical analysis
    • 4.1Canonical vs. relativizing concessives
    • 4.2Levels of linking
    • 4.3The givenness status of the concession
    • 4.4The topic-comment structure of concessive sentences
    • 4.5Summary
  • 5.Quantitative analyses
    • 5.1Basic types: Canonical concessives, relativizing concessives and concessive adversatives
    • 5.2Levels of linking
    • 5.3The givenness status of the concession
    • 5.4The topic-comment structure of concessive sentences
    • 5.5Summary
  • 6.Structural properties of concessive clauses
  • 7.Combining functional and structural variables
  • 8.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.305.06gas
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