Concessive schemata

Understandably, being principally an interactional phenomenon, Concession interpreted as a sequential discourse relation requires at least two disputants. Hence, spoken data are full of instantiations of the prototypical dyadic realisation of this relation, that is the Cardinal Concessive Schema. Yet, because of the contextual parameters of written discourse, such as the absence of the adversary and the high degree of editedness, in this mode of language Concession is exemplified by monologic sequences produced by one arguer, rather than by more frequent dialogic schemata.

In the following section, the concept of Concessive schemata will be further explored and special attention will be paid to pseudo-dyadic and monadic patterns, exemplifying the two subtypes of monologic schemata found in the corpus.

5.1.1. Identification of monologic schemata: pseudo-dyadic and monadic patterns

As has been mentioned, six types of monologic Concessive schemata instantiate the Concessive relation in the corpus: Pseudo-Dyadic Concessive Schema (PD), Reversed Pseudo-Dyadic Concessive Schema 1 (rPD1), Reversed Pseu-do-Dyadic Concessive Schema 2 (rPD2), Monadic Concessive Schema (M), Reversed Monadic Concessive Schema 1 (rM1), and Reversed Monadic Concessive Schema 2 (rM2) (see Figures 5.1.1-5.1.6). The above list of Concessive schemata is a slight modification of the framework proposed by Barth-Weingarten (2003); it encompasses two Reversed Pseudo-Dyadic Concessive schemata, while the original model includes only one such schema.