The action-oriented concept of Concession seems not to have received any attention by discourse analysts studying Polish conversational data. It is therefore the aim of this article to demonstrate the usefulness of this analytical model in discourse-pragmatic studies of spoken Polish and to open a forum for discussion on how the Concessive relation – one of the organising principles of spoken interaction and text-forming strategies in written communication – is realised by Polish speakers in various communicative settings. Towards this end, the study focuses on common ways of marking acknowledgments and rebuttals attested by real-life data (private conversations and radio talk) and it demonstrates patterns which are realised by speakers negotiating meaning in informal and semi-formal contexts. The analysis clearly shows that, trying to mitigate the possible negative effect of disagreement, Poles usually follow the tak, ale schema, even though disagreement-agreement patterns are attested as well. As regards the type of marking, it is found that while countermoves are associated predominantly with ale, acknowledgments are cued by modal adverbs, evaluative adjectives, deixis, prosody and repetition. Finally, it is concluded that application of the interactional model of Concession in contrastive analyses of Polish and English can not only further discourse analysts’ understanding of the organisation of spoken interaction, but it can also have a bearing on language instruction and acquisition.
