THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF COMPOUND CONJUNCTIONS OF IMMEDIATE ANTERIORITY IN RUSSIAN: AS YET UNRECOGNIZED BUT ALREADY FUNCTIONING CONJUNCTIONS

The article is focused on one of the mechanisms of forming compound conjunctions of immediate anteriority in Russian. This mechanism is the grammaticalization of temporal adverbs with one of two meanings (‘at once’ or ‘soon’) that ultimately leads to their inclusion in the morphological structure of compound conjunctions. This and other mechanisms produce a lot of synonymous conjunctions, of which some eventually fall out of use, leaving others to take their place. The group of synonyms includes: 1) so called «conjunctive particles» tol’ko ‘only’, lish ‘only’, jedva ‘barely’, chut’ ‘a little bit’; 2) compound conjunctions, representing various combinations of the given particles (lish tol’ko, jedva lish, jedva lish tol’ko, and others), and also stable combinations of tol’ko with the conjunctions kak ‘as’ and chto ‘that’ (kak tol’ko and tol’ko chto); and 3) «two-part compound» conjunctions, consisting of a given «conjunctive particle» or «compound conjunction» in the subordinate clause and «correlative» (tak or to), or conjunction (kak‘as’, i ‘and’ or a ‘and / but’) in the main clause. We give syntactic, prosodic, and semantic arguments advocating for the inclusion of compound conjunctions containing the grammaticalized adverbs srazu ‘at once’ (srazu kak, srazu kak tol’ko) and totchаs ‘at once’ (tot chаs kak, totchаs kak tol’ko) in the group. We note that the conjunctions of immediate anteriority formed through the grammaticalization of temporal adverbs already existed in Russian previously (cf. the obsolete conjunction kak skoro, lit. ‘as soon’, mentioned in academic grammars). We also note that adverbs with the meaning ‘at once’ or ‘soon’ are incorporated into the structure of conjunctions of immediate anteriority in other languages, as well. This fact can be explained by the identity of truth conditions of complex sentences with conjunctions of immediate anteriority and corresponding compound sentences with adverbs denoting a minimal or small time interval between the two events denoted by the conjuncts.