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Concessives, Pre-Modern

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2017

Abstract

As in many other instances of marking semantic relationships between propositions, Classical Chinese tends to be very economical in handling concessive complex sentences. The set of special concessive conjunctions is very limited and does allow precise differentiation of further semantic nuances.

Nonetheless, there is a surprising variety of patterns of concessive sentences, if we take in account other markers, such as the various adverbs occurring in the apodosis, or clearly concessive patterns that usually go unnoticed in standard grammars. The article describes the forms of concessive sentences in this language in detail.