Concessive Clauses

This article presents the history of the Latvian disjunctive conjunction jeb ‘or’ and analyzes its relationship with OLith. jeib ‘if’. Jeb as a disjunctive conjunction is a result of strictly Latvian development and originates from the concessive conditionals with two counterconditions in the protasis.

It is well known that Judeo-Spanish has been formed and has developed outside the Iberian Peninsula in the so-called Sephardic diaspora. It was disconnected from the evolution of peninsular Spanish for several centuries and was beyond the reach of normative measures promulgated by the Real Academia Española since the eighteenth century. Also, there is a broad consensus among linguists with respect to the fundamental characteristics of concessive clauses, which are considered one of the most complex types of sentences both at a formal and a semantic level. This paper links these affirmations with the aim to analyse, on the one hand, how the peculiarities of Judeo-Spanish have influenced the configuration of its paradigm of concessive connectors, and on the other, if the study of concessivity allows to reach conclusions regarding the essential characteristics of the Sephardic language. These and other related issues are covered in an exemplary manner through the study of three concessive connectors: aunque, malgrado and afilú. Are their uses and meanings synonymous or do they only appear to be?

Since the beginning of the Sephardic diaspora in the Ottoman Empire, Judeo-Spanish has been in contact with different languages, both romance and others. The lexical borrowings from these languages are a characteristic element of Judeo-Spanish, especially the Hebraisms of the classical period (until the beginning of the 19th century) and the Gallicisms of the modern period (from the middle of the 19th century onward). The results of these language contacts have seldom been analyzed from a syntactical point of view, a fact that reflects the general lack of detailed studies about Judeo-Spanish syntax. The aim of this paper is to summarize the results of language contacts that can be observed in the concessive and concessive conditional clauses in modern Judeo-Spanish texts, published between 1880 and 1930. First, we see an increase and a diversification of the concessive conjunctions due to the contacts with Western European languages, especially Italian. Second, a linguistic innovation in the concessive conditional clauses reflects the fundamental changes in the language contacts of Judeo-Spanish between the 18th century and the modern period, as well as the modernization of Judeo-Spanish that characterizes its transformation during the last decades of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

Le proposizioni concessive occupano un posto particolare rispetto ad altre frasi avverbiali, in quanto comportano una maggiore elaborazione logica: non a caso appaiono tardi nel corso dell'apprendimento linguistico, sono poco adoperate nella lingua informale e in quella dei semicolti e anche nella lingua colta di registro elevato ricorrono più raramente di altre subordinate. L'espressione della concessività si presenta come una struttura complessa e polisemica. Il presente lavoro dimostra come già nella lingua dei secoli passati la relazione
concessiva non avesse carattere monolitico, bensì potesse assumere a seconda del contesto d'uso diversi valori semantici. La ricerca propone una ricca e articolata classificazione che distingue ben dodici tipi di concessive, individuabili in testi di vario genere che vanno dal XIV al XVIII secolo.
Corredato da più di cento grafici che forniscono precise indicazioni sulla frequenza dei diversi valori concessivi e delle congiunzioni a essi corrispondenti, il saggio offre inoltre una copiosa esemplificazione: più di milleseicento sono i passi citati e commentati.

This contribution presents a comparative, corpus-based study of three concessive subordinators from English, German and Spanish, i.e., 'although', 'obwohl' and 'aunque'. It investigates differences in the distribution of these operators on the basis of richly annotated data from the Europarl corpus, taking into consideration structural properties of the relevant clauses (position and length), the type of semantic relation holding between the main clause and the concessive clause, the level of linking (propo-sitional, illocutionary, textual), and information structural parameters (status of the concessive clause, topic-comment structure). The study shows that there are significant differences between German obwohl on the one hand, and English although and Spanish aunque, on the other. German obwohl is more restricted in its distribution and mostly occurs in 'canonical' concessives, while English although and Spanish aunque are used in a broader range of contexts, beyond the canonical distributions (e.g. in 'restrictive' uses, and at a textual level). This observation is related to the fact that German, unlike English and Spanish, uses a specific type of word order in subordinate clauses, which seems to block distributional extensions, at least in the formal register investigated in the present study (political speech).

Language, Cognition and Logic,
Viewed from the Polysemy of a Japanese Formal Noun tokoro (location)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an approach to language as it relates to cognition and thought processes by looking into the mapping relation among spatial, temporal, and modal domains. I will take up the problem of polysemy involving tokoro, a formal noun meaning ‘location’ in Japanese, to discuss such problems as the relation between language and inferential mechanisms, the interfaces between syntax and semantics, and those between semantics and pragmatics.  I will first discuss various spatial usages of tokoro expressing place or location to characterize its core meaning as ‘identifying a reference point,’ which is crucially used in relative nouns expressing space orientation.  Secondly, I will examine how the core meaning thus characterized can be extended to the temporal domain.  In the temporal domain, tokoro identifies a part of the temporal trace of an event as a reference point, and orders the event to be located with respect to the reference point identified by tokoro, thereby accounting for how the addition of tokoro to a predicate restricts the interpretive possibilities for expressions of tense and aspect, specifically -ru, -teiru and -ta.  In the modal domain, tokoro, when attached to a predicate, requires the sentence to be a counterfactual conditional: Both the premise and the consequent must be interpreted to be counterfactual.  I demonstrate how the characterization of tokoro as ‘identifying a reference point,’ and the mechanisms underlying said characterization as argued for in this paper can account for the counterfactuality of tokoro conditionals in the modal domain.

This paper gives complete guidelines for authors submitting papers for the AIRCC Journals. A sliding puzzle is a combination puzzle where a player slides pieces along specific routes on a board to reach a certain end configuration. In this paper, we propose a novel measurement of the complexity of 100 sliding puzzles with paramodulation, which is an inference method of automated reasoning. It turned out that by counting the number of clauses yielded with paramodulation, we can evaluate the difficulty of each puzzle. In the experiment, we have generated 100 * 8 puzzles that passed the solvability checking by countering inversions. By doing this, we can distinguish the complexity of 8 puzzles with the number generated with paramodulation. For example, board [2,3,6,1,7,8,5,4, hole] is the easiest with score 3008 and board [6,5,8,7,4,3,2,1, hole] is the most difficult with score 48653.Besides, we have succeeded in obverse several layers of complexity (the number of clauses generated) in 100 puzzles. We can conclude that the proposed method can provide a new perspective of paramodulation complexity concerning sliding block puzzles.

2007 « Continuity and discontinuity in discourse. Notes on yet and still. » in CELLE, A. et HUART, R. (ed.) Connectives as Discourse Landmarks John Benjamins. (177-194)

yet and still each have three clearly differentiated uses relating to considerations of aspect, degree and argumentation. This paper provides a description of yet and still showing how these uses are linked. Within the Theory of Enunciative Operations I provide a representation of schematic forms for yet and still enabling us to derive local values as functions of the notional domains involved. yet marks the construction of an offline position in opposition with a preconstructed position in non p. still constructs an occurrence of a notion p identified to and continuous with a previous occurrence. These hypotheses are supported by close analysis of genuine utterances. Aspectual, quantifying or argumentative uses of yet and still derive from the properties of the domains concerned.

1998 « Notes on Wh- ever Concessive Constructions (Whatever they are) », Anglophonia, 4. Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Mirail. (7-31)

This paper aims to study the paradigm of concessive constructions involving WH -EVER markers. Firstly, I show that it is possible to derive a concessive signification from the abstract forms mobilised by the use of these markers as subordinating clauses. Secondly, I go on to study the different WH -EVER markers in specific detail. It is seen that the various signification obtained depend closely on the properties of individual markers (WHENEVER, WHOEVER, WHATEVER etc.). In short, for one syntactical construction three interpretations appear possible: a fully concessive interpretation, a generalising interpretation and an indefinite interpretation. The last part is dedicated to a remarkable construction in which the WH- EVER construction targets the referential possibilities of part of the preceding main clause. The four possible significations depend upon the scope of the scanning operation marked by the morpheme EVER. The final signification of a given construction is shown to be the result of a calculation based on preenunciative, predicative and enunciative parameters.

El tema del presente estudio es la expresión de la condicionalidad y de la concesividad en judeoespañol moderno escrito (1880-1930). En la primera parte, se expone el contexto histórico-político y sociocultural que permitió la formación del judeoespañol moderno y se elabora una profunda base teórica sobre las dos categorías oracionales mencionadas. En la segunda parte, se describen los distintos tipos de construcciones condicionales y concesivas que se emplean en los textos sefardíes y se incluye, además, un excurso sobre las oraciones adversativas. En todos los casos, se analizan los conectores empleados en las oraciones estudiadas (sobre todo conjunciones y locuciones conjuntivas) y el uso modo-temporal en prótasis y apódosis. También se toman en consideración factores diacrónicos y criterios contextuales, tales como la autoría de los textos analizados, su procedencia geográfica y los registros y tipos textuales. De esta manera, se perfilan características, evoluciones y tendencias internas del judeoespañol, influencias de las lenguas de contacto (en la época moderna, sobre todo del francés y del italiano), así como similitudes y diferencias entre la lengua sefardí y el castellano.

Se lo studio della sintassi può apparire ai non appassionati arida materia, il presente volume è volto a sfatare questa communis opinio. Vi sono raccolti sette saggi che mettono in luce svariati aspetti della frase complessa: dalla concitata “sintassi della guerra” delle cronache trecentesche alla lingua delle infuocate prediche del Savonarola, dal "cum inversum" stilema di apparizioni e visioni, all’idea del mondo rovesciato espressa nelle frasi concessive. Apparentemente eterogenei per gli argomenti linguistici affrontati, i sette capitoli che compongono il libro sono in realtà accomunati dalla ricca tipologia testuale su cui l’analisi è fondata (testi di prosa d’arte come la Vita Nova o il Decameron, ma anche testi di prosa media e di carattere pratico, come le lettere e i volgarizzamenti)
e dalle metodologie d'indagine, che adottano accanto ai principi della linguistica storica prospettive e procedure di analisi moderne.

1997 « An Enunciative Study of the Rectifying Concessive Constructions : Not that, Except and Only », Anglophonia, 2. Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Mirail. (107-128)

The concessive signification can be constructed by an overwhelming variety of markers. The concessive signification is nonetheless spoken about as if it were a single, massive and homogeneous area of meaning. On closer inspection, there are in fact numerous subtypes of concession, the interpretation of which will vary according to the mode of construction. These different subtypes are specific, but possess a number of common properties which allow us to group them together as "concessives". The present study is divided into two main parts. The first presents a general schema for concessive utterances, and introduces the opposition between standard and rectifying concessives. The second part looks at three markers of a rectifying concessive, not that, except and only, which form a micro-system. The differences in use between the markers are explained within the framework of the Theory of Predicative and Enunciative Operations, and the concepts of the speaker (énonciateur) and the notional domain (domaine notionnel). The argumentative use of a given marker is explained in terms of a calculation which is marked by the linguistic items under scrutiny. It is also worth noting that the various grammatical categories from which the three markers originate also pleads for a transcategorial approach to linguistic phenomena.

This article offers a diachronic view on the conditional and concessive clauses in Judeo-Spanish. The main research material is a corpus of Sephardic texts published in the Eastern Mediterranean between 1880 and 1930. The paper describes some linguistic innovations on one hand and the maintenance of certain medieval linguistic features on the other hand. It also shows transformations between the classical Judeo-Spanish (18 th century) and the so-called neojudeoespañol of the modern period, as well as changes during the decades represented in the corpus. Additionally, some similarities and differences between the Sephardic and the Spanish conditionals and concessives will be mentioned. Such a multiple approach to the two types of sentences allows to demonstrate that some general linguistic preferences of Judeo-Spanish, the results of language contacts and the processes of expanding and modernizing the language during the 19th and 20th centuries can not only be observed in the lexicon, but also in grammatical elements and in the verbal system.

Este artículo analiza, desde una perspectiva diacrónica, algunas características de las oraciones condicionales y concesivas en judeoespañol. Partiendo de un corpus de textos sefardíes publicados en la región mediterránea oriental entre 1880 y 1930, se observan innovaciones lingüísticas al lado de fenómenos conservadores, se describen cambios entre el judeoespañol clásico (siglo XVIII) y el llamado neojudeoespañol de la época moderna, y se reconocen transformaciones en las décadas mismas del corpus estudiado. Asimismo, se señalan similitudes y diferencias entre las condicionales y concesivas en judeoespañol y en castellano. Este acercamiento múltiple a las dos clases oracionales permite mostrar que ciertas tendencias generales de la lengua sefardí, los resultados de contactos lingüísticos, así como los procesos de elaboración y modernización de la lengua en los siglos XIX y XX no solo se observan en el léxico, sino también en los mecanismos gramaticales y en los usos modo-temporales de los verbos.

This paper provides a basic description of the formal and functional features of the concessive conditional clauses marked by -təri in Marathi and by -temo in Japanese through a contrastive analysis. The major findings of the study are as follows: First, both languages have the same organisation of proposition i.e., p though ￢q for the concessive conditionals. Second, both languages use a concessive conditional clause for other extensive expressions. Third, though Marathi concessive conditionals are considered as finite, its clauses exhibit features of non-finite languages like Japanese. Fourth, the difference between the structures of Marathi and Japanese concessive conditional is in the verb inflection.
Paper Available: http://www.ls-japan.org/modules/documents/LSJpapers/meeting/161/handouts/d/D-4_161.pdf

In what follows I propose to study various combinations of the marker ALTHOUGH with the auxiliary DO in affirmative forms as illustrated by (1) below, for example: (1) ALTHOUGH an unhappy liaison with Rodin consumed much of her attention during the next several years, she DID produce many drawings […] 1 Put like that, the subject may appear to be of limited interest, a micro-subject in the grammar of English if ever there was one. What caught my interest to begin with, though, were the tensions inherent in the combination of the concessive marker ALTHOUGH, signalling a potential incompatibility between two propositions, and the so-called "emphatic form" of the auxiliary DO 2 (where DO is neither negative, interrogative nor a proform), which is often characterised as strengthening the speaker's endorsement of a proposition. I have worked on both markers separately in past papers and hope in the present paper to show how models elaborated to account for ALTHOUGH and DO aff independently can be articulated to account for interpretative possibilities provided by their combination in an intelligible fashion. To do this I propose to use the conceptual framework provided by the Theory of Enunciative Operations as elaborated by Antoine Culioli and his collaborators over the last forty years or so. 3 The first part of this paper will present a number of theoretical preliminaries necessary to understanding the model, including, most importantly, an introduction to the concept of the notional domain. The second part will provide summary models for both ALTHOUGH and DO aff within the Theory of Enunciative Operations. The third and final part will endeavour to address the problem of interrelating the metalinguistic representations of Part 2 to account for genuine corpus examples of ALTHOUGH-DO combinations. 1. Theoretical preliminaries 1.1 The operation of categorisation Much of our everyday language activity involves operations of categorisation, in other words, operations whereby subjects 4 seek to match prelinguistic, cognitive representations (or, what a subject means) and linguistic representations (how to say it). This may be represented within the Theory of Enunciative Operations as an operation by which occurrences are situated relative to a complex topological space called a notional domain. To illustrate how things work let us work up from a simple-but authentic-text, reproduced below. (2) The path from the celebrated singer to the respected maestro-a walk on a tightrope? "At the beginning it was all very complicated. Conducting is per se difficult, but practice makes it easier. Naturally, I always had the respective orchestra and audience on my side. But the critics were 1 Unless otherwise indicated, the examples are taken from the BNC Sampler, a one-million word corpus of written and spoken English drawn from the original BNC (cf. bibliography for references). 2 The appellation is poorly chosen since emphasis is not a morphological but a prosodic feature. In the rest of the paper we will refer to the affirmative auxiliary DO followed directly by the base form of the verb as DO aff. 3 Cf. bibliography for the most cited references as well as for bibliographical references in English. 4 The term subject is used technically as the ultimate source of the various operations of location implied in the act of utterance.

O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar como a relação retórica de concessão é expressa por meio de orações hipotáticas adverbiais concessivas em um corpus constituído por elocuções formais (aulas) e entrevistas. A perspectiva teórica adotada foi da RST (Rhetorical Structure Theory – Teoria da Estrutura Retórica do Texto), uma teoria que parte do pressuposto de que, além do conteúdo explícito veiculado pelas orações, há relações retóricas que surgem das relações que se estabelecem entre partes do texto. Utilizaram-se parâmetros da Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (GDF) para a caracterização das construções hipotáticas adverbiais concessivas utilizadas pelos falantes para expressar a relação retórica de concessão. Pretendeu-se com isso fornecer pistas para auxiliar na identificação dessa relação.