Concession in spoken English

This book focuses on Concession, one of the so called adverbial relations, in English. Particular attention is drawn to its realisation and function in public spoken discourse. In contrast to earlier semasiological studies, it identifies the relation on the basis of three actions: claiming, acknowledging and countering. This approach uncovers that Concession is rather frequent in spoken language. It occurs in a variety of structural patterns and its discourse functions extend beyond face-saving. For the analysis the study successfully combines the advantages of the qualitative methods of Conversation Analysis with quantitative corpus research. This forces the analyst beyond the clear cases and draws attention to the specificity of the individual case while at the same time offering the opportunity of generalising the qualitative results.