COGNITIVE-SEMANTIC APPROACH TOWARDS THE DESCRIPTION OF CONNECTORS (CONNECTORS OF IMMEDIATE PRECEDENCE)

The case study demonstrates the advantages of the cognitive semantic approach towards the phenomenon of variability of immediate precedence connectors. In section 1 we show the drawbacks of the treatment of this phenomenon in «Russian Grammar» (1982), which is far from modeling the ability of a speaker to express the given temporal relation; despite its minuteness, it does not account for some varieties of connectors occurring in the corpora. The cognitive-semantic approach starts from speaker’s communicative intention and models the process of its transmission by appeal not only to linguistic, but also to communicative competence and common knowledge. Due to this, the relation of immediate precedence can be implicated (see section 2). In section 3, we distinguish two types of explicit immediate precedence markers (temporal adverbials, e.g. srazu ‘at once’ and connectors), and elucidate factors that condition their insertion into sentential structure. In section 4 we discuss simple connectors — the discourse markers jedva ‘barely, hardly’, lish’ ‘only’, tol’ko ‘only’ and chut’ ‘a little’, functioning as conjunctions. Section 5 is devoted to the problem of “complex conjunctions”, e.g. jedva lish’ ‘as soon as’. We argue that all such connectors (except kak tol’ko) are regular phrases, propose rules of their formation and give semantic motivation underlying their emergence. In section 6 we focus on the polysemantic conjunction kak ‘as, how, whence’ and show that when it is used in the presence of an unambiguous immediate precedence connector, it performs a demarcation function, thus creating the so-called “two-place conjunction”. In section 7 we consider other means of demarcation of discourse units within a sentense — correlative pronouns, and outline modern tendencies of their use. In conclusion, we underline the fact that the cognitive semantic description of the connectors’ variability is more economical and has greater explanatory power.