Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

6.5 Results: Contrastive/concessive conjuncts
Contrastive/concessive conjuncts (cf. Table 2-5) mark either contrast or 
difference between information in different discourse units, or indicate concessive 
relationships. It follows from the meaning contrastive/concessive conjuncts can 
express that they contribute to the dialogue between the author of the text and the 
prospective reader(s) as well as other researchers’ standpoints referred to in the 
text (cf. e.g. Malá 2006, Povolná 2010).
Concession is viewed here as a special case of contrast, notably that between 
the expected or usual causal relationship and the actual situation (Dušková et al. 
1988, Fraser 1999). Therefore, contrastive/concessive conjuncts discussed in this 
chapter subsume those expressing contrast as well as concession, since “indeed, 
there is often a mixture of contrast and concession” (Quirk et al. 1985: 1102) 
and “in some cases, elements of contrast and concession are combined in uses 
of linking adverbials” (Biber et al. 1999: 878), and therefore it is not always 
possible to draw a strict borderline between these two semantic classes. Although 
Biber et al. (ibid.: 879) suggest grouping adverbials expressing contrast and 
concession according to whether their primary meaning focuses on contrast (e.g. 
instead
, 
conversely
, 
in contrast
) or concession (e.g. 
nevertheless
), with regard to 
the reasons mentioned above, such a distinction is not drawn in this chapter.
Although the most common contrastive/concessive conjunct 
however
, 
reaching the frequency of occurrence 1.57 in the NNSC and 1.43 in the NSC, 
has been exemplified in several examples above, let me now show and discuss 
still another one, since it clearly testifies how voices other than the author’s own 
can enter an academic text owing to the application of contrastive/concessive 
conjuncts such as 
however
. It must be admitted, though, that apart from conjuncts 
there are other language means that enable the expression of contrast/concession 
and reference to other authors’ standpoints, for example, conjunctions such as 
although
, one token of which is shown in Example (11) above and another in 
Example (12), which follows; in the latter case 
although
is used in combination 
with a direct quotation, indicated by inverted commas, i.e. a language means 
which evidently introduces a voice other than the author’s current own into the 
text.

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(12) NSC, Text 9
This work is interestingly different from the simulation work described 
earlier because it explicitly positions itself within a framework defined 
by nonlinear dynamical systems theory, and explicitly uses a neural 
network model. However, McNellis and Blumstein’s (2001) work is also 
characterised by very small lexicons – in their case only four words – and 
although they consider that their work is “a reasonable first approximation 
to the system we envision with respect to much larger size vocabularies”, 
proof of this claim is explicitly left to further work.