담화세계 간 경계로서 러시아어 접속사 а

The Russian Conjunction А as a Discourse Boundary Marker

This study investigates discourse functions and pragmatic implicatures of the Russian conjunction A. We classify the conjunction А’s functions into ‘incongruity’ and ‘contrast’ and compare them with similar functions of other Russian conjunctions, such as I and NO. The ‘incongruous А’ does not implicate a strong cause-and-effect relationship, and it is easier to switch the antecedent clause with the following one in a sentence with the conjunction A than in a sentence with NO. In addition, the fact that a cognitive subject of the conjunction A is located outside the event facilitates the use of speaker-oriented predicates and adverbs. In the case of the ‘contrastive A’, it does not implicate a close internal correlation between two characteristics or two events described in the conjunct phrases but juxtaposes two independent events and characteristics without implying a strong cause-and-effect correlation or a clear antonymous semantic relationship between them. Having the information structure ‘T1-R1, а T2-R2’. the ‘constrastive А’ introduces a new topic or a new theme with a high pitch intonation before or after the conjunction and phonetically emphasizes the unexpected coocurrence of independent things. The cognitive subject of the Russian conjunction A puts different things together and make them to be semantically and pragmatically linked. The cognitive subject s juxtaposition reveals the contrast between the juxtaposed features and events, and the Russian conjunction A s function to express an incongruity seems to be derived from the other function of contrast that belongs exclusively to the conjunction A. The conjunction A’s logical incongruity that is somewhat weaker than that of the conjunction No, results from this contrast between two different things revealed by the observation of the cognitive subject who does not participate in the event, but not from the collapse of the normal cause and effect relationships between the described events themselves. The Russian conjunction A even contrasts the words uttered in the speech and the non-uttered words in the thought, and it can appear at the very beginning of the first utterance without any antecedent utterance. That must be because the Russian conjunction А plays a role of a boundary marker to introduce a new discourse, such as a new temporal, thematic or speech regime, contrasting it with a overtly or covertly given one.