L’espressione della relazione concessiva fattuale in italiano e in russo

The Expression of Factual Concessive Relation in Italian and Russian The aim of this paper is to identify and compare the means of expression of factual concessive relation in Italian and Russian on the basis of a bidirectional parallel corpus. Factual concessive relation, as a consistent and shared relational concept which can be defined independently of its linguistic expression, can be used as a tertium comparationis. Some differences in terminology in Russian and Italian research literature on the topic shall be considered before starting data analysis. The content of factual concessive relation is subsequently defined in order to find and describe its forms of expression in the two languages. The study of the expression of purposive interclausal relation revealed that loose coordination prevails in Russian while tighter subordination dominates in Italian (Biagini 2012). For this reason, the paper aimed to determine whether Russian and Italian show different preferences in the forms they choose for the expression of concessive relation. In the aforementioned case, the results do not confirm a predominance of juxtaposition or coordination in Russian when compared with Italian. Differences in the patterns of equilibrium between inference and coding strategies in the two languages were not highlighted either. It would be useful to verify these results on a larger parallel corpus. This would also make it possible to point out the functional equivalence of some means of expression in Russian and Italian.