Explaining additive, adversative and contrast marking in Russian and English

The functional space covered by the conjunctions and and but in English is divided between three conjunctions in Russian: i ‘and,’ a ‘and, but’ and no ‘but.’ We analyse these markers as topic management devices, i.e. they impose different kinds of constraints on the discourse topics (questions under discussion) addressed by their conjuncts. This paper gives a detailed review of the observations from descriptive literature on the distribution of these markers in light of the proposed underlying classification of questions, and shows that our theoretical approach provides a uniform explanation to a large variety of their uses, as well as to the existing equivalences and non-equivalences between the Russian and the English counterparts.