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Rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) has been recognized as a promising and powerful multiple access (MA) scheme, non-orthogonal transmission framework and interference management strategy for 6G. Inspired by the appealing spectral efficiency gain achieved by RSMA over conventional MA schemes in multi-user multi-antenna transmission, in this paper we introduce RSMA to reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided multiple-input single-out (MISO) broadcast channel (BC). To further enhance the spectral efficiency, a more generalized RIS architecture called fully connected RIS is considered. By jointly optimizing the scattering matrix of the fully connected RIS and the transmit beamformers to maximize the sum-rate, we show that the proposed fully connected RIS aided RSMA transmission scheme significantly improves the spectral efficiency compared with the conventional single connected RIS …