Terminological tools to describe the connecting units of the Russian language

Purpose. The article is devoted to the dynamics of theoretical understanding of connecting elements and the development of corresponding terminology in the Russian linguistic tradition. The research analyzes classic works of the founders of traditional Russian grammar as well as the latest linguistic works.Results. The study reveals three main levels of terminology which is applied to connecting units and related to their very nature: connecting units play an important role in creating the coherence of oral and written speech, and therefore are studied in the linguistics of discourse and text; connecting units are used in the organization of simple and complex sentence, and therefore are studied in syntax; connecting units are special lexical units that receive morphological characteristics. In general, we can say that in the 20th century the part-of-speech paradigm moved to syntactic and textual ones. First linguists tried to determine the place of connecting elements among the classes of words (parts of speech), but since the middle of the 20th century the idea of the priority of syntactic function over morphological characteristic has been increasingly expressed. This tendency was clearly manifested in discursive linguistics studying coherent texts and integrating very heterogeneous phenomena on the basis of common functions.Conclusion. Despite some inconsistency of the modern Russian terminology describing connecting elements it identifies their semantic-grammatical and functional originality.