Distinctive Usage of Though and Although: Presupposition vs. Assertion

Distinctive Usage of Though and Although: Presupposition vs. Assertion

This paper investigates into the distinctive usage of although. and conjunction though Most studies tend to treat although as the mere formal variant of though (cf Burchfield 1996 46; also see Biber et al 1999·845) However, my pilot study of 30 native American speakers of English and an analysis of the corpus (MICASE for spoken data & my own collections for the written data) expose the different usage of these two items. The study suggests that the points of 'indirectness' made by Collins (1995) should be interpreted as the semantic difference rather than stylistic variation It also argues, following Sidiropoulou (1992), that although bears certain 'assertion' besides the 'presupposition' thought to be the common semantic property of both conjuncts. Coupled with semantic differences, the study presents the distinctive function of the two conjuncts as wen: discourse-wise, though has the function of connecting words and phrases within a sentence (e g. gap-filling), while although involves the organization of discourse (e g topic-marking) (cf Barth 2000)