Concession strategies in online newspaper comments

Abstract This paper scrutinizes concessive relations explicitly signalled by conjunctive (e.g. but, although, though), prepositional (e.g. despite, in spite of, regardless of), adverbial (e.g. however, yet, still) and pronominal (e.g. whatever, whoever) connectors. The study is based on 393 tokens extracted from SOCC, a corpus of online news comments (Kolhatkar et al., 2020) and it adopts a discourse-interactional perspective combining the interactional model (Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson, 2003, 2005; Barth-Weingarten, 2003) with prior research recognizing different observation levels (Sweetser, 1990; Crevels, 2000; Latos, 2009). We argue that the act of “conceding” in online news comments deploys specific concessive schemata (monadic and pseudo-dyadic) that generally realize an interpersonal function (as politeness and/or (dis)alignment strategies), although they may also work at the ideational (expressing a contrast or restricting the applicability of a claim) or textual (topic and discourse management) levels. Furthermore, the evaluative potential of concessive patterns is also teased out while simultaneously spotlighting their contribution to the degree of constructiveness and toxicity of online comments (Gautam and Taboada, 2019). In sum, our findings reveal that the capabilities of concessive relations are even broader and more manifold than previously suggested.