Explaining Conjunction Systems: Russian, English, German

Abstract

The paper analyses the Russian conjunctions i, a and no, the English conjunctions and and but and the German conjunctions und, aber and sondern in terms of specialised additivity: special cases of the relation between sentences expressed by too and  also. The first section gives an overview of the analysis, the second section tries to give an explicit characterisation of additivity and its specialisations. The third section uses an OT-like framework to explain the complementary distribution of the conjunctions and the blocking effects that result.