Concessive conjunctions in written American English
Diachronic and genre-related changes in frequency and semantics
Based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA; Davies 2010–), this chapter inspects the frequencies and semantics of the concessive
conjunctions although, though and even though from the 1860s to the present day. In the data, although and
though predominantly express what Sweetser
(1990) has called speech-act concessives, while even
though mainly expresses content concessives. However, there is a general
development towards a higher proportion of speech-act concessives. Further, although and
even though increase in frequency, while though
decreases over time. Semantic properties and the double function of though (conjunction
and conjunct) are proposed as explanations. Frequency changes progress equally through all genres, but the semantic
change seems to have pervaded all genres only as far as although is concerned.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Research background
- 2.1Three semantic types of concessives
- 2.2The stylistics of concessive conjunctions
- 2.3Research questions
- 3.Methodology
- 4.Results
- 4.1Corpus examples
- 4.2Frequencies
- 4.3Semantics
- 5.Summary and outlook
-
Notes
-
References
References
Aarts, Bas
1988 Clauses of concession in written present-day British English.
Journal of English Linguistics 21(1): 39–58.


Agresti, Alan & Finlay, Barbara
2009 Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences. Upper Saddle River NJ: Pearson Education.

Alexander, Marc & Davies, Mark
2015–
Hansard Corpus 1803–2005.
[URL]
Anscombre, Jean-Claude
1989 Théorie de l’argumentation, topoï, et structuration discursive.
Revue Québécoise de Linguistique 18(1): 13–55.


Azar, Moshe
1997 Concessive relations as argumentations.
Text 17(3): 301–316.


Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.

Britain, David & Trudgill, Peter
2000 Migration, dialect contact, new-dialect formation and reallocation. In
Dialect and Migration in a Changing Europe,
Klaus J. Mattheier (ed.), 73–78. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Burnham, Josephine M.
1911 Concessive Constructions in Old English Prose. New York NY: Henry Holt.

Crevels, Mily
2000 Concessives on different semantic levels: A typologocal perspective. In
Cause – Condition – Concession – Contrast. Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives,
Elisabeth Couper-Kuhlen &
Bernd Kortmann (eds), 313–339. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


Davies, Mark
2010–
The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words, 1810–2009.
[URL]
Di Meola, Claudio
1998 Zur Definition einer logisch-semantischen Kategorie: Konzessivität als „versteckte
Kausalität“.
Linguistische Berichte 175: 329–352.

Francis, W. Nelson & Kucera, Henry
1979 Manual of Information to Accompany A Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English, for Use with
Digital Computers. Providence RI: Brown University Department of Linguistics.
[URL] (27 February 2015).

Hermodsson, Lars
1994 Der Begriff „konzessiv”. Terminologie und Analysen.
Studia Neophilologia 66: 59–75.


Hilpert, Martin
2013 Constructional Change in English: Developments in Allomorphy, Word formation, and Syntax. Cambridge: CUP.


Hilpert, Martin & Gries, Stefan Th.
2009 Assessing frequency changes in multistage diachronic corpora: Applications for historical corpus
linguistics and the study of language acquisition.
Literary and Linguistic Computing 24(4): 385–401.


Hopper, Paul J.
1991 On some principles of grammaticization. In
Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol I: Focus on Theoretical and Methodological Issues [
Typological Studies in Language 19],
Elizabeth Closs Traugott &
Bernd Heine (eds), 17–35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott
2003 Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP.


Huddleston, Rodney D., & Pullum, Geoffrey K.
2002 The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP.


Hundt, Marianne & Mair, Christian
König, Ekkehard
1985 On the history of concessive connectives in English: Diachronic and synchronic
evidence.
Lingua 66(1): 1–19.


Mair, Christian
2006 Twentieth-Century English. History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: CUP.


Mollin, Sandra
2007 The Hansard hazard: Gauging the accuracy of British parliamentary transcripts.
Corpora 2(2): 187–210.


Oxford English Dictionary Online
Oxford: OUP.
[URL] (22 February 2017).
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Arnold.

R Development Core Team
2016 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Version 3.2.4. [computer program].
[URL]
RStudio Team
2009–2015 RStudio: Integrated Development for R. Version 0.99.486. Boston MA: RStudio.
[URL]
Sarkar, Deepayan
2014 lattice: Lattice Graphics. R-package version 0.20-29.
[URL]
Smitterberg, Erik
2014 Syntactic stability and change in nineteenth-century newspaper language. In
Late Modern English Syntax,
Marianne Hundt (ed.), 311–29. Cambridge: CUP.


Smitterberg, Erik & Kytö, Merja
2015 English genres in diachronic corpus linguistics. In
From Clerks to Corpora: Essays on the English Language Yesterday and Today,
Philip Shaw,
Britt Erman,
Gunnel Melchers &
Peter Sundkvist (eds), 117–33. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press.


Sweetser, Eve E.
1990 From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: CUP.


Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt
2013 Analysing aggregated linguistics data. In
Research Methods in Language Variation and Change,
Manfred Krug &
Julia Schlüter (eds), 433–455. Cambridge: CUP.


Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Dasher, Richard B.
2002 Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: CUP.

Trudgill, Peter
1986 Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 may 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.