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# Ma(r)king concessions in English and German

**Authors:** Brigitte Grote, Nils Lenke, [Manfred Stede](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/manfred-stede/) · **Year:** 1995 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 6th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (Leiden); arXiv:cmp-lg/9506001 **Link:** [arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9506001](https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9506001) · **Licence:** arXiv (no licence stated) — summary only

[**19** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/grote-1995-ma-r-king-concessions-english/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we readarXiv:cmp-lg/9506001 · Proc. of the 6th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, NL-Leiden, May 1995

- [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9506001)
- [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/cmp-lg/9506001)
- [arXiv cmp-lg/9506001](https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9506001)

**Authors (3)**

1. Brigitte Grote
2. Nils Lenke
3. Manfred Stede

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper is about choosing a concessive discourse marker (*although*, *though*, *nevertheless*, *despite*; German *obwohl*, *trotzdem*, *zwar ... aber*) when a generator has to signal a concession. The authors first separate three pragmatic uses from corpus concordances: convincing the hearer by conceding a counter-argument (Concede-I), denying a false implicature after the main point (Concede-II), and informing about a surprising correlation (Concede-III). They then give one knowledge pattern for all concessions: A implies C, B implies not-C, and the A-B link is the common ground. The main finding is that the pragmatic class fixes the order of the parts and the syntax, but not the marker; within each syntactic group the markers are largely interchangeable, differing in intensity, register and conditionality. They propose a generator in which an RST-like tree is linearised into sentence plans and then realised by systemic networks for English and German, with separate choice points for intensification, conditionality and formality.

## Ideas

- I1. Encode the English concessive markers as a closed Rust enum with three classes (a conjunctive adjunct, a subordinator, a preposition), not as strings. Use the class to pick the order of the two clauses and the syntax, then check the marker choice with the rule that the register and conditionality features give.
- I2. A rule for the minor and main act: "on the one hand ... on the other hand" makes the last clause the main act. Implement this in `prag/src/roles.rs` or the discourse module, and show which clause was chosen as main and why.
- I3. A concession detector over English text: a cue set (although, though, even though, despite, nevertheless, however, still) with the three classes as labels. Measure the precision of each class on a hand-coded English test set, and use a negative control of non-concessive uses of *though* ("as though", "though" as a final adverb).
- I4. Denial-of-implicature check (Concede-II): a sentence with "That doesn't mean ..., though ..." should be read as a repair of an inference, which the frame reader can mark as a denial with the inferred clause.

## For Mova

The chapters are [24. Coordination and subordination](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/24-coordination-subordination/) (subordinate *although*, *despite* as a preposition), [36. Discourse relations and coherence](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/36-discourse-relations/) (contrast, concession, the cue-to-relation mapping) and [38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/) (*nevertheless*, *though* as discourse markers). The code is `en/src/dict.rs` (marker lexicon), `prag/src/infer.rs` (the failed-expectation inference) and the discourse relations in `world`. The paper is about generation, so the measures are for analysis: class precision and recall for the concession detector on English, and the share of cases where the order rule and the gold clause order agree.

Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/discourse-analysis/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [arXiv cmp-lg/9506001](https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9506001)

```
@misc{grote1995ma,
  title = {{Ma(r)king concessions in English and German}},
  author = {Grote, Brigitte and Lenke, Nils and Stede, Manfred},
  year = {1995},
  eprint = {cmp-lg/9506001},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9506001}
}
```

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