tv.um.es

Concessive relations, in as far as they are often used with the aim of increasing the addressee’s positive attitude towards the speaker’s beliefs, have been quite unanimously deemed to have an important argumentative and persuasive value in academic discourse in general (Couper-Kuhlen & Thompson 2000). This paper aims to offer a preliminary description of concessive clauses in online discussion forums, a type of evaluative/argumentative discourse, where concession is used as a persuasive strategy. This description takes into account the distribution of a number of linguistic features that have been considered to be frequent in this type of discourse (Hyland 2005) and, hence, to co-occur with concessives (Musi et al 2019), i.e. hedges, intensifiers, pronouns and positive/negative-sentiment words. Variations in the frequency of use of these linguistic features will be explored in relation to different contextual factors: (i) post section (pre-proposal and proposal); (ii) concessive proposition (i.e. ‘A’, the ‘conceding’ proposition; and ‘B’ the denial-of-expectations proposition); (iii) gender (male vs female); and finally, (iv) L1 (English NS vs. Spanish NNS).
Our data have been extracted from the English component of SUNCODAC which contains students´ comments and proposals for improvement of the translations posted by a forum moderator (Fernández-Polo & Cal-Varela 2017). Our characterization concentrates exclusively on a selection of 180 concessive clauses headed by but, since this is by far the most frequent concessive connector ((Taboada & Gómez González 2012)
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The quantitative analysis seems to confirm the existence of a significant association between post section and the different linguistic features under study ( 2 = 35.592; p=.000), with hedges and positive words being more frequent in pre-proposals, and intensifiers and negative words, in proposals. A similar significant association was found between section and type of pronoun ( 2 = 35.596; p=.000). This, together with the fact that 1st- and 2nd-person singular pronouns represent nearly an 80% of the total pronoun occurrences, could be connected with the dialogical character of argumentative concessions. There is also a significant interaction between proposition type and feature ( 2 = 64.4002; p = < 0.00001). Furthermore, the results suggest that positive-sentiment words and boosters tend to be frequent in proposition A (the evaluative proposition), while negative-sentiment words and hedges are more prone to appearing in proposition B (the criticism). The analysis also indicates the existence of important gender differences (with females overusing all features, except for hedges). Finally, the fact that NNS significantly underuse all linguistic features under study might point to the existence of a major acquisition problem (Hinkel 2005).