A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

By using a concessive clause, a speaker states that something happens in spite of a state of affairs. Concessive clauses are expressed in English with subordinators such as although (among others) (‘Although Rose hates pineapple, she has eaten my cake’).

         Concessive clauses are semantically (and often superficially) similar to concessive conditionals (SYNTAX 3.5.1.4). The main difference between them is that, by using a concessive conditional, one does not entail that the antecedent must be true. For example, the concessive conditional sentence ‘Even if Rose hated pineapple, she would eat my cake’ does not imply that Rose hates pineapple.

         However, the sentence ‘Although Rose hates pineapple, she has eaten my cake’, a genuine concessive, does imply that Rose hates pineapple at the moment of utterance and, nonetheless, she is willing to eat my cake made of pineapple fruit.

         While there is clear evidence that concessive conditionals are subordinate clauses, further research is needed to establish the exact syntactic status of LIS constructions that are functionally equivalent to concessive clauses. In this section, we list a variety of ways in which the concessive meaning can be expressed in LIS.