The research was intended to provide insight into the organisation of judicial argumentative discourse by way of a contrastive, quantitative and qualitative, study of recurrent schemata, signals and functions of a selected discourse-pragmatic relation, as observed in judgments issued by two last-instance courts and drawn up in English and Polish, accordingly. The area of investigation was narrowed down to the realisation of Concession, given the fact that to date (to the best of my knowledge) no study of this relation in the discourse of judges has been undertaken.

Drawing on the interactional concept of Concession designed by Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (1999) and advanced by Barth-Weingarten (2003) as well as applied by Łyda (2007), the study was to contribute another description of this discourse phenomenon, complementing previous studies. On the other hand, it was undertaken with a view to supplementing numerous analyses of judicial argumentation carried out from the point of view of formal logic, legal theory and philosophy by means of a linguistic exploration of pragmatically relevant lexical and grammatical components making up the architecture of judicial argumentation and conveying judicial stance. What is more, the research was supposed to contribute a fuller picture of Concession in written discourse in contrast to earlier investigations, describing concessivity as an interclausal relation and analysing it in idealised and decontextualised examples.