This study based on a rich corpus of written texts examines first of all the concept of concession and defines it as 'covert causality'. This is then taken as the foundation for a typology of the various concessive values. After a survey of the major connectives in German (subordinating, coordinating, prepositional), the study concentrates on an analysis of the subordinating constructions. A comparison with Italian shows that in both languages the morphological structure of a connective has a decisive influence on the semantic and syntactic features of the construction in which it figures.