Concessive constructions in English business letter discourse

This paper presents an analysis of the pragmatic use of concessive constructions in business letter discourse. In linguistics, concession has been analyzed primarily within concessive clauses, which have been widely studied, either alone or compared with other syntactic categories such as adversative, causal, or conditional clauses. The term 'concessive' itself belongs to the terminology developed within traditional grammar to classify adverbials and adverbial clauses. Heretofore, less attention has been paid to the pragmatic use of concession, i.e., the way in which concessive constructions strategically function within a specific context. The context under analysis in this paper is that of the 'business letter' genre. Analysis of a corpus of English business letters shows that concessive constructions are used in this genre both for propositional (or ideational) and procedural (or interpersonal) reasons. This paper considers only the second to be truly pragmatic. Preference for the first or second strategy depends on the text types belonging to the genre. When procedural reasons prevail, concession is mostly introduced for politeness reasons, politeness being one of the factors constantly at play in business exchanges.