Concessive Engagement In English And Chinese Academic Discourse

The study presented in this paper is an exploration of the similarities and differences of concessive engagement between English and Chinese Academic Discourse (EAD and CAD) in linguistics from the levels of lexis and syntax. Engagement, as one of the three sub-systems of Appraisal, is concerned with the lexical and grammatical resources by means of which the authorial voice engages itself with other voices and positions in the dialogical context. Previous studies have mainly focused on the application of various Engagement resources in a certain discourse, but studies on more detailed analysis of features and interpersonal meanings of a certain sub-category of Engagement resources are still very rare. Concession is one of language means to realize the various Engagement meanings. Moving away from descriptions of concessive connectives solely in terms of textual relations, this study explores their interpersonal meanings with regard to Engagement by demonstrating different rhetorical choices in EAD and CAD.Concessive resources are concluded in this study from two self-constructed corpora of 40 English articles and 40 Chinese articles in the field of linguistics. The approach adopted is a combination of quantitative and qualitative ones. By using the Corpus analysis toolkit AntConc 3.4.4, typical lexical resources of English and Chinese Concession are identified with data being collected from the two corpora, and typical syntactic patterns are summarized through observing the data; then the rhetorical mechanism and different rhetorical effects of concessive engagement are analyzed; the contrastive analysis of Concession and concessive engagement is finally provided and reasons are explained. Following on these analyses, this study clearly indicates that there exist various concessive resources in both EAD and CAD.The similarities between the two corpora are as follows:In both EAD and CAD, ten typical English concessive markers and ten typical Chinese ones are identified, with more concessive markers being used in Introduction than in Conclusion; concessive relations construed under "concede+counter/Ca+C(3" pairings outweigh those under "counter+ concede/Cβ+Ca" pairings; Real Concession is more frequently adopted than Hypothesized Concession; four rhetorical effects of concessive engagement are identified: Negative Voice-Centered and Positive Voice-Assisted, Positive Voice-Centered and Negative Voice-Assisted, Positive Voice-Centered, and Negative Voice-Assisted, with Positive Voice-Highlighted being the most widely realized effect.The differences between the two corpora are as follows:English academic authors tend to use more concessive resources to close down the dialogic space and syntactic patterns of typical English Concession are more complex than those of Chinese one; the occurrence of typical concessive markers in Introduction and Conclusion of EAD is higher than that in CAD; English concessive markers are generally used alone, while Chinese concessive markers are generally used in collocation with adversative conjunctions or adverbs; no medial position of Chinese concessive markers is found in CAD, though both English and Chinese concessive markers can be positioned after subjects; Concession realized under "counter+concede" pairings is more frequently adopted in EAD than in CAD; the occurrence of Hypothesized Concession in EAD is lower than that in CAD, while more negative units in English Concession are constructed through critical thinking.This study provides an explanation of reasons through linguistic characteristics, cultural backgrounds and thought patterns, contributing to offering some guidance on both the writing and reading of EAD and CAD in linguistics. Authors should be concerned about the selection of the appropriate patterns to adopt a stance, while readers have to be familiar with these patterns in order to identify easily the expressing intentions and the stance that authors take.