This collective monograph by the Language Typology Workshop of the St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistic Research (Russian Academy of Sciences) proposes a study of concessive constructions in different languages from a single theoretical perspective. The monograph was prepared under a general research program adopted in the Laboratory as of the 1960s and focused on the grammatical verb categories related to the semantic and syntactic sentence structure. It continues the earlier collective monographs published under this program.

The volume consists of two parts and two appendices. Part 1 includes one chapter which sets forth the theoretical concept underlying all linguistic analyses provided in the collective monograph. The concept was developed as a device to describe concessive constructions in any language in a form which makes it possible to explicitly show both the common (above all, semantic) properties and typological (above all, formal) differences among concessive sentences attested in both related and unrelated languages. In addition, Chapter 1 provides a description of prototypical and marginal types of concessive constructions and proposes two multidimensional calculus classifications for concessive and concessive-conditional constructions.

Part 2 consists of three sections and 20 chapters on concessive constructions in various natural languages. The descriptions are to a large extent uniform, since they are based on the same typological questionnaire. The languages addressed in detail include: Bulgarian, Armenian, Early Latin, French, English, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Hausa, Indonesian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Ancient Chinese, Ancient Greek, Turkic languages, Even, Evenki, Eskimo, Japanese, and Agul (a Daghestanian language). Appendix 1 proposes a study of a concessive-conditional construction in Russian.

Appendix 2 presents a universal typological questionnaire on concessive constructions used as a yardstick for all descriptions provided in Part 2. The questionnaire has several sections, each addressing a separate set of issues with a preliminary brief description of those issues illustrated with examples from various languages and followed with relevant questions.