Grammatical Realization Of Concession

The study presented in this paper is an exploration of the possibility of grammatical realization of Engagement system by exploring syntactic structures of Concession. The Engagement system is one of the three systems of Appraisal theory. Appraisal theory, comprising three systems Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, is concerned with the interpersonal meaning of language, with language resources encoding writer-reader or speaker-listener relationships. In Appraisal system, evaluative resources are divided into three domains, i.e. Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation. Attitude is concerned with the language function by which writers/speakers express their judgment or emotions toward certain person or social realities. Engagement is concerned with language resources indicating the writers/speakers’ opinion with respect to other view points or propositions. With these language resources writers and speakers can either acknowledge or fend off the possibilities of alternatives to his own propositions, and by doing this take an intersubjective positioning. Graduation refers to language resources by which writers/speakers raise or lower the degree of Attitude and Engagement. With these language resources writers/speakers may either enforce or weaken their emotional responses, or clear or blur their intersubjective positioning. The system of Engagement has been well constructed on discourse-semantic level and profoundly discussed on lexical level, but it has not been attended on syntactic level. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to bring Engagement to the syntactic level.Syntactic structures of Concession are concluded in this study from authentic language materials from the corpus Bank of English. The approach adopted is a combination of qualitative and quantitative ones. Data are collected from the corpus according to lexical realization of Concession, and eleven typical syntactic patterns are summarized through observation of the data. It is shown that people tend to use different grammatical structures in written and spoken texts when expressing the meaning of concession. Afterwards, features and characteristics of each pattern are analyzed and discussed, and accordingly Concession is classified into several different semantic categories. Results of the study show that Engagement can be construed by specific grammatical structures and that Concession can be divided into Internal and External according to whether the concessive meaning is within or beyond the verbal context. Internal Concession refers to meaning relations between clauses of one sentence, or between a clause denoting counter and its verbal context where the concede relies. In other words, the meaning relations are within one text. Contrarily, External Concession refers to meaning relations between the voice within a text and some voice outside of the text. It is a compromise between the writer/speaker and his putative reader/listener. Internal Concession is further categorized into Real and Hypothesized. Real Concession refers to those the concede of which are existing facts or events already happened while Hypothesized Concession are those the concede of which are hypothesized conditions which may not happen. From the aspect of semantics, Concession is divided into Counter and Compromise. Counter refers to concessive meanings where the major purpose is to assert authorial voice and Compromise functions to reconcile different opinions of the writer/speaker and the reader/listener.