Two Russian biclausal coordinate adversative constructions based on the two Ruussian analougues of the English conjunction BUT will be compared. These adversative conjunctions are NO 'but/though' (closer in meaning to the Japanese KEREDOMO), and A 'but/while/and' (closer in meaning to the Japanese GA). These two constructions function differently in naturally occuring discourse which will be demonstrated basing on the corpus of Night Dream Stories - oral narratives elicited from children, who were instructed to tell in as much detail as possible about the night dream (s)he had. This discourse-oriented case study will be shown to be relevant for developing the typological basis for cross-linguistic comparison of clause-combining devices.