In everyday communicative arenas, we engage in critical discussions to persuade others to change their views about issues of personal as well as public interest. Discourse analysts have deemed concessions as privileged strategies to manage disagreement and reach consensus. However, a coherent and comprehensive account of the argumentative functions played by different concessive relations is lacking: do concessions always bear an argumentative role? By which semantic and pragmatic properties? What type of argumentative moves do they instantiate? To answer these questions, (...) we propose a corpus-based study of lexical markers of concessions in the subreddit Changemyview. Drawing from a multilevel semantic and pragmatic annotation, polysemous markers with contrast are disambiguated, and an empirically motivated typology of concessive relations is proposed. The results of the analysis highlight two types of concessions that are specialized in introducing and/or preventing counterarguments. (shrink)

Las conjunciones coordinantes adversativas son estructuras coordinantes que conllevan necesariamente un contraste entre dos elementos relacionados con los enunciados que unen. El contraste es un concepto heterogéneo, ya que podemos identificar tres tipos de contraste : restrictivo, correctivo y aditivo. Propondremos una interpretación semántica para cada tipo de contraste, y defenderemos el carácter presuposicional del contraste restrictivo. Con ello, pondremos de relieve que el discurso en el que se insertan las conjunciones coordinantes adversativas debe plantear alternativas que, cuando el tipo (...) de contraste no está unívocamente lexicalizado, guían la interpretación de las conjunciones coordinantes adversativas. (shrink)

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that (...) the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation. (shrink)

Adversative coordinative conjunctions necessarily involve a contrast between two elements related to the utterances they coordinate. Contrast is a heterogeneous concept. In this article, three types of contrast are identified: restrictive, corrective and additive. These types give rise to three different readings of the adversative coordinative conjunctions. In this work, a semantic function for each type of contrast is proposed, and the presuppositional character of restrictive contrast is defended. These hypotheses lead us towards the discourses in which the coordinative adversative (...) conjuncts are inserted. The discourse has to contain alternatives such that when the type of contrast is not univocally lexicalized, the alternatives will guide the interpretation of the conjunction. (shrink)