Concession Patterns and Strategies in Language Acquisition Results & Discussion Discourse: A Corpus-Linguistics Study

Abstract

Concessive markers such as although, despite, however, and while are paramount in academic writing for signaling contrast and tempering claims within a systemic-functional approach (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Biber & Gray, 2010). Studies on the use of these markers in the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) texts appear to have received little attention from a corpus linguistics perspective. Informed by SFL and the framework provided by Zhang (2021), this study works with a corpus of Results and Discussion sections of 321 open access SLA articles. Firstly, raw frequency counts were calculated for ten concessive markers as indicated by Zhang (2021) and ten concordance lines per marker were randomly sampled for functional classification. Secondly, collocational profiles were created in AntConc v4.3.1 with a ±5-word window, a minimum frequency threshold of five, and log-likelihood ranking (Anthony, 2024). Results indicated that over 60 percent of the occurrences are made up of adversative and contrastive markers which serve the primary purpose of sentence and paragraph level transitions. In comparison, subordinating conjunctions and prepositional forms, although infrequent, are used for clause-level mitigation alongside broader discourse level concession. The results demonstrate the importance of frequency analysis alongside concordance-based classification and collocational profiling to articulate complex functional differences among concessive marker types. From a pedagogical perspective, the study indicates that teaching both the marker type and its typical cotextual framing using academic texts may improve coherence in the learners’ writing.