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Word-order variation in a contact setting: A corpus-based investigation of Russian spoken in Daghestan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2021

Chiara Naccarato*
Affiliation:
Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Anastasia Panova
Affiliation:
Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Natalia Stoynova
Affiliation:
V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences / Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, National Research University Higher School of Economics
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: ch1naccarato@gmail.com

Abstract

This paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present a corpus-based investigation of word order in the variety of Russian spoken in Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases with a genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, the nonstandard word order GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained in terms of syntactic calquing from the speakers’ left-branching L1s. However, the order GEN+N does not occur with the same frequency in all types of genitive noun phrases but is affected by several lexicosemantic and formal features of both the head and the genitive modifier. Therefore, we are not dealing with simple pattern borrowing. Rather, L1 influence strengthens certain universal tendencies that are not motivated by contact. The comparison with monolinguals’ Russian, in which prepositive genitives sporadically occur too, supports this hypothesis.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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