Understanding and producing connectives in a second language

The article examines the issue of understanding and producing connectives. In the first language the main factors complicating these two processes are the cognitive complexity of the discursive relation expressed by the connective, the semantic coherence of text fragments and polyfunctionality, polysemy and frequency of use of the connectives. In the second language, additional factors should be considered, including the discrepancies between the systems of the first and second languages and interference-related problems, i.e. the erroneous transfer of the properties of the first-language connective to the properties of the second-language connective and (less often) vice versa. These issues are considered using the example of errors made by professional translators that are documented in the Supracorpora Database of Connectives created using the parallel French and Italian subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus.