On the variation of the ways of expressing concessive relationships (on the material of scientific articles)
Introduction. The research is carried out within the framework of the theory of functional grammar and is aimed at studying semantic features of concessive relations and specialized means of their expression in Russian. The formal and substantial variability of concessionary constructions is noted, and an assumption of stylistic heterogeneity of language units expressing the semantics of concession is suggested. Material and methods. In spite of the research of concessionality, including its representation as a constituent part of the conditionality field, the semantics of concession and its expressive means have not been previously examined from the aspect of functional and stylistic usage. The formal, semantic and stylistic variation of concessionary units, conditioned by communicative settings and linguistic features of scientific style, are studied. The texts of the nuclear genre of scientific discourse - 3708 scientific articles of different thematic orientation, published in ranked Russian journals - were used as the material. Results and discussion. Scientific works devoted to the linguistic expression of concessive relations in Russian demonstrate the complexity and heterogeneity of this type of semantics and different ways of its expression. The analysis of concessive constructions in scientific articles on philology, history, biology, engineering and information science and economics shows that complex sentences with the conjunctions despite/disregarding that, but, however, although, as well as simple sentences with the prepositions despite/disregarding, despite, regardless of, etc., can be considered as special means of expressing these meanings in scientific language. On the basis of the quantitative data obtained, the article presents the percentage ratio of concessionary units in scientific articles on different topics and reveals the productive means of expressing the concession for each topic. From the point of view of the concession field, the most typical particular meanings of the concession (concessive-predicative, concessive-restrictive and real-concessive) and the absence of other meanings realized in other styles of the Russian language (concessive-predicative, concessive-retributive and reinforced-concessive meanings) were revealed. Conclusion. As a result of the study the average indicator of concessionary relations in the articles on different topics of scientific style was established, the substantive, formal and stylistic variation of concessionary units was noted, the correlation between the thematic focus of the articles under consideration and certain means of expressing concession was revealed, which requires further study.