Connectives — full-time employees in discourse and outsourcers in pragmatics .
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2025-3-3
- Pages
- 40-53
Abstract
The article is devoted to connectives, i. e., functional words and constructions whose primary function is to express semantic relations between units of discourse. It aims to explore the pragmatic dimension of connectives, which remains largely underappreciated in linguistic pragmatics to date. Given that the concept of pragmatics has at least two distinct interpretations in linguistic research—here termed the epistemological (pragmatics as shared knowledge activated in discourse production and comprehension) and the semiotic (pragmatics as information about the speaker’s attitude toward the utterance, conveyed through linguistic means)—both perspectives are addressed. The introductory section justifies the use of the term konnektor (the Russian equivalent of connective), a relatively recent addition to Russian linguistic terminology, arguing for its advantages over closely related terms. This section also demonstrates the formal diversity of connectives. Section 2, the main body of the article, consists of two parts. In the first (2.1), it is argued that pragmatics, in its epistemological interpretation, functions as a factor that specifies or refines the general semantic relation expressed by the connective. In the second part (2.2), the focus shifts to the semiotic interpretation, where we identify pragmatic components within the linguistic meaning of connectives. Based on the analysis of several representative cases, the article concludes that,
in addition to their primary function of marking semantic relations within discourse, some connectives also perform a secondary function: conveying pragmatic information about the speaker’s attitude toward the propositional content of the connected units.