Contrastive relational markers in women’s expository writing in nineteenth-century English

Margarita Esther Sánchez Cuervo ORCID

margaritaesther.sanchez@ulpgc.es

Discourse, Communication and Society Research Group

Departamento de Filología Moderna, Traducción e Interpretación,

Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

Sánchez Cuervo, M. E. (2023). Contrastive relational markers in women’s expository writing in nineteenth-century English. Language Value, 16(1), 42-67. Universitat Jaume I ePress: Castelló, Spain. http://www.languagevalue.uji.es.

June 20231

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.6035/languagev.7228

ISSN 1989-7103

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to analyse the occurrence of contrastive relational markers in a corpus of recipes called Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English, the 19th century sub-corpus (COWITE19). Opposition relations, also referred to as adversative or contrastive, are usually identified with markers such as “but”, “although”, and “however”. From a semantic point of view, a classification of these relations can be established as contrast, concession, and corrective, based on their linguistic evidence, lexical differences and syntactic behaviour (Izutsu, 2008). A further rhetorical function is antithesis, presented as a consistent device possessed of a verbal, analytical and persuasive nature (Fahnestock, 1999). The analysis of these markers is made following a computerised corpus analysis methodology and aims to discern which contrastive markers are mostly employed for the instructions conveyed by females. It also shows which opposition relation is predominant, whether contrastive, concessive, or corrective. Finally, it detects antithesis as an additional opposing meaning. In all cases, the possible argumentative role of these markers is highlighted as another step in the characterisation of women’s scientific writing.

Keywords: opposition; contrastive; concessive: corrective; antithesis.

I. INTRODUCTION

This article seeks to identify and analyse the main contrastive relations in the corpus of recipes called Corpus of Women’s Instructive Texts in English, the 19th century sub-corpus, hereafter COWITE19 (Alonso-Almeida et al., 2023). The sub-corpus comprises texts written by women which detail the preparation of multiple recipes. For this research, the author has focused on the period which covers the timespan between 1806 and 1849. Recipes can be broadly defined as a list of steps that are followed, for example, in a culinary or medical procedure, and that are usually organised by a series of guiding instructions during their preparation. As a genre, the recipe is described by its external features, bearing in mind the purpose of this activity in which the writers of recipes engage as members of our culture (Martin, 1984, p. 25). As a text-type, in contrast, the recipe is explained by means of its internal linguistic criteria, that is, its morphological, syntactic and lexical characteristics, so it can be mainly developed as an expositive or instructive text-type (Alonso-Almeida & Álvarez-Gil, 2020, pp. 64-65; Biber, 1988). Some of these linguistic features comprise the use of contrastive discourse markers which signal the basic relation of opposition between discourse segments.

In this study, broad consideration will be given to Izutsu’s (2008, pp. 648-649) research on three semantic categories of opposition relations: contrast, concessive, and corrective, which are mostly derived from Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1991). It is a model which offers an analysis of each semantic category, and it is suitable for the corpus under study. Izutsu (2008, p. 647) acknowledges that most studies concerning opposition relations base their argument on the dichotomy which exists between the contrast and concessive dichotomy (Blakemore, 1987, 1989; Kehler, 2002; Lakoff, 1971; Spooren, 1989) and the corrective and non-corrective dichotomy (Abraham, 1979; Anscombre & Ducrot, 1977; Dascal and Katriel, 1977; Foolen, 1991; Lang, 1984; von Klopp, 1994; Winter & Rimon, 1994). As will be seen in the results of the corpus study, the concessive dichotomy is the most repeated, mainly expressed by the coordinating conjunction ‘but’.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

The study of opposition relations includes a variety of terms like contrastive, concessive, and adversative. Grammars such as Greenbaum and Quirk’s A Student’s Grammar of the English Language (1990, p. 186) include the following names regarding the semantics of conjuncts under the umbrella of contrastive meanings:

Lyons (1971) distinguishes between two uses of “but”: semantic opposition, in cases such as “John is tall, but Bill is short”, and denial of expectation, as in “John is tall, but he’s no good at basketball”, which could be paraphrased as the concessive “Although John is tall, he’s no good at basketball”. As to the relation of contrast, it has been typically marked as paratactic in terms of functional grammar through the relationship of enhancement, in which one clause enhances the meaning of another by employing a number of possible expressions which cover the references to time, place, manner, cause and condition (Halliday, 1985, pp. 232-239).

From a pragmatic perspective, the connection of contrast can be conveyed by using a varied scale of expressions. For Rudolph (1996, pp. 27-28), this particular connection indicates that there is a relationship between two contrastive states of affairs and the speaker’s opinion of that relationship. In the example “He needed the money, but I did not lend him any”, the author explains that one person is in need and the second person is expected to answer to that need; however, the second person decides not to help him. A “but” sentence seems to be a logical contrastive expression, however, without using that conjunction, the interpretation is still the same: “He needed the money. I did not lend him any”. Likewise, in the sentence “Although he needed the money, I did not lend him any”, the author admits another form of contrast with the semantic value of concession. In all of the examples, there is a causal constant that alludes to the fact that one person is in need and the other is expected to help him, but he/she does not. As a result, the causal chain that should naturally occur in these cases is broken and the expectation of help is not fulfiled. Rudolph (1996, pp. 32-39) adds that connective expressions are signs for the hearer/listener to help him/her decode the speaker’s utterance, whereas for the speaker, those expressions become instruments to give his/her personal views. Rudolph also makes a difference between simple and complex adversative and concessive connectives by including “but”, “although” and “however” within simple connectives. In contrast, complex connectives are made of two or more lexical items that receive their new contrastive meaning in the act of composition and function. “Nevertheless” and “even if” comprise an instance of complex adversative and concessive linkers respectively.

In a similar vein, Sweetser (1990, p. 76) claims that conjunctions as logical operators must be studied not only from a lexical-semantic analysis, but from “the context of an utterance’s polyfunctional status as a bearer of content, as a logical entity, and as the instrument of a speech act”. In a study of “but”, the scholar (Sweetser, 1990, p. 103) argues that many examples might be connected with “real-world” clash or contrast. Sweetser establishes a difference in cases like “John eats pancakes regularly, but he never keeps any flour or pancake mix around” and “John is rich but Bill is poor”. In the first case there seems to be a clash in the real world because the causal sequence that implies that John should keep flour if he is a pancake-eater is disrupted; in the second there is indeed a contrast, in that we can believe that there is no clash in John being wealthy and Bill being destitute since both rich and poor people exist simultaneously in the real world. A further vision of contrast is seen in Thompson et al. (2007, pp. 262-263), who include concessive clauses as a subtype of adverbial clauses. “Concessive” is discussed as a general term for a clause establishing a concession against which the proposition in the main clause is contrasted. According to this concept, definite concessive clauses are considered, which are marked by a subordinator like “although”, “even though”, or “except that”, and can be paraphrased by inserting “in spite of the fact that…”; and indefinite concessive clauses, which indicate a meaning such as “no matter what” or “whatever”. They are usually expressed by means of an indefinite pronoun as in “Whoever he is, I’m not opening that door”.

II.1. Izutsu’s model of opposition relations

Izutsu (2008, pp. 656-671) organises opposition relations into three distinct semantic categories: contrast, concessive and corrective, which are illustrated by the following examples:

This classification of semantic relations was already discussed by Foolen (1991), who categorised them as “semantic opposition” (contrast), “denial of expectation” (concessive) and “correction” (corrective). Foolen regards these differences as pragmatic or “polyfunctional” rather than semantic, whereas Izutsu deems that these categories can be disambiguated regardless of the context where the sentence occurs and, as a result, they are not pragmatically ambiguous but semantically distinct from one another.

Izutsu examines the semantic categories of opposition by considering the following four factors:

Izutsu (2008, p. 656) explains that the compared items (CIs) are to some extent different and are supposed to belong to “mutually exclusive regions in a shared domain”. The second factor has to do with the number of contrasted items in a comparison, and with whether the CIs are explicitly distinguished or, by contrast, this fact is not clear enough in each sentence. The third factor focuses on whether there are one or more assumptions involved in the meaning of the opposition which show that some information is inferred by the speaker at the time of speaking. Finally, the fourth factor is related to whether the semantic content of each segment linked by a connector is accepted as valid or invalid by the speaker. A segment is defined here as a term made up of several sizes of connected units, be it a word, phrase, clause, sentence, or a stretch of discourse.

II.1.1. Contrast

This first relation is defined as a simple opposition between the propositional contents of two symmetrical clauses. The change of meaning is not clear after the order of clauses is reversed, and the inclusion of the “and” linker does not entail a significant variation either. This relation should have the following characteristics:

The term domain or cognitive domain has to do with “a context for the characterisation of a semantic unit”, according to Langacker (1987, p. 147). The following example contains explicitly different CIs (“John” and “Tom”), which are compared in terms of the same domain and size, and show mutual exclusiveness, “small” vs. “big”.