О прагматических особенностях русского слова однако в сравнении с немецкими аналогами

This paper provides a detailed analysis of pragmatic particularities of the Russian functional word odnako. I claim that most Russian-German dictionaries have failed to account for the meaning of this word. Authors of bilingual dictionaries typically follow their own intuition and provide some accidental examples instead of pursuing a semantic analysis. I propose to use well-known methods in the study of polysemy such as Eve Sweetser's Three-level Approach to the description of functional words. More specifically, I divide odnako into three big groups according to its functions: connective, modal and communicative. The special object of investigation in this paper is its connective function. An analysis of Russian and German examples will show how the pragmatic context can influence the semantic meaning and the function of the connective.