The marker to as a means for highlighting implicative relations (case study of esli… to ‘if… then’ conjunction).

In this paper we are concerned with factors underlying the use of the correlative element to that appears in combination with some subordinating conjunctions in Russian. We focus on the distribution of the conditional construction esli… to (‘if… then’), but other conjunctions compatible with to (kogda… to, raz… to, poka… to etc.) are taken into consideration as well. We argue that the function of to is to contrastively emphasize the implicative relation expressed by the corresponding subordinating conjunction. The suggested interpretation helps to explain facts concerning the distribution of esli… to, the range of conjunctions combining with to and the comparative frequency of to usage with different conjunctions.