- Communicative Objective: Learn to express fine distinctions between full agreement, partial agreement, reservation, skepticism, and principled disagreement in intellectually demanding conversations.
- 5 Core Functional Sentences:
- I agree with the thrust of the argument, though I am less convinced by the way the conclusion has been framed.
- That is a reasonable interpretation, but I would hesitate to treat it as the only plausible one.
- We are broadly in agreement on the diagnosis, even if we differ considerably on the appropriate remedy.
- I can accept the conclusion in principle, but only with significant reservations about how it would operate in practice.
- My objection is not to the objective itself, but to the assumption that the proposed means are necessarily the most effective.
- Grammar Focus: Concessive clauses, cleft-like contrastive structures, restrictive adverbials, embedded clauses, elliptical comparison, and stance-marking constructions.
- Vocabulary Focus: thrust, plausible, diagnosis, reservation, remedy
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Expressing Subtle Degrees of Agreement and Disagreement
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