Contrast, concession, and counter-argumentation in academic texts: an exploratory analysis

Abstract

The present study takes an integrated approach of grammatical elements and structures from the perspective of their functioning in texts/discourses. It focusses the semantic-pragmatic and argumentative-discursive values of utterances represented by the conceptual scheme Yes... But..., in academic writing, in particular master’s theses and reports. Its object are discursive sequences with a composite argumentative movement comprising concession and contrast /counter-argumentation. From a wide universe of works, made up of final reports from FLUP Master’s students, from the years 2020-2022, five works were selected in which the discursive sequences in focus frequently occur. The set of clipped sequences constituted the corpus of this study. After the theoretical framework, an exploratory analysis of qualitative and interpretative nature was carried out, based on procedures such as: the segmentation of utterances with movements of concession and contrast, starting from the identification of linguistic elements related to the conceptual scheme Yes..., But...; the categorization and description of these segments, taking into account syntactic-semantic and pragmatic-discursive dimensions; the comparison of the values displayed by the sequences of the different categories; the explanation of the occurrences in the academic genre in question; the articulation of the linguistic elements with the enunciative, interactional and contextual dimensions of discourse production. The 176results show that contrastive constructions, such as adversative and concessive, acquire, in discourse, very similar semantic-pragmatic and discursive-argumentative functions, serving to mark mitigated discordant polyphony and a confrontational strategy that combines agreement (even if partial) with disagreement, a strategy that proves to be particularly appropriate in the discursive genre under analysis. They also demonstrate that this movement is present in academic works with higher classifications, in the final assessment of the course, working as evidence of the author’s capacity for problematization and critical, divergent thinking. In this way, it may come to function as a specific marker to improve the academic writing competence.