Conjunction ili 'or' in the Russian dialects of the Amur Region

The article examines constructive and communicativepragmatic properties of the conjunction ili ‘or’ in the Russian dialects of the Amur Region. It aims to analyze the types of constructions with ili, their morphological and syntactic features, as well as to describe typical communicativepragmatic situations where the contexts with the conjunction are used by the Amur dialect speakers. Over 300 contexts containing the conjunction were selected by continuous sampling from the second edition of “The dictionary of the Russian dialects of the Amur Region”. To process the material, descriptive, quantitative, comparative, semantic and communicativepragmatic methods were used. As a result, it was found that the constructive properties of the conjunction ili in the Russian dialects of the Amur Region generally coincide with its properties in Standard Russian. The specificity of the constructions with ili in dialects is determined only by the conditions of their functioning – the dialects themselves. Therefore, there is an increased frequency of pronominal word forms with indeterminate semantics in the composed sentence parts. Using these forms, the speaker reports that there is an indefinite number of alternatives for solving a particular communicative task. The communicative and pragmatic properties of the conjunction are determined by the realities of the dialect speakers’ lives reflecting their agricultural, commercial, handicraft and other activities.