Conjunctions as markers of rhetoric relations in discourse: the case of Russian ‘и’ – Союзы как маркеры риторических отношений в дискурсе: русский союз ‘и’

Abstract

The paper is a case study in semantics of conjunctions treated as markers of semantic relations between discourse units. The variety of uses, that grammarians called «specific senses» of the main Russian coordinate conjunction и (“and”), is explored from this perspective. The rhetorical relations (RR s) from the Rhetorical Structure Theory of Mann and Thompson are used as a meta-language for the description of conjunctions’ meaning. The wide spectrum of RRS compatible with the use of и is described and it is demonstrated that in general a «specific sense» of the conjunction in a given compound sentence can be correctly interpreted only in the context of a larger discourse unit.