Towards a Semantic Typology of Adversative and Contrast Marking

The article concerns the issue of the semantic typology of adversative connectives such as Russian no and English but. I adopt a semantic map approach in order to establish semantic relations between the adversative function and other functions in the domain of coordination on the basis of cross‐linguistically attested polysemy patterns. Thus, I establish two ‘routes’ connecting the adversative to the coordinating (‘and’) function, via the contrast function, on the one hand, and the mirative function, on the other hand. It is further shown how this semantic map can be used to constrain polyfunctionality of coordination markers, as attested in natural languages.