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Посессивные конструкции с препозицией генитива в русском языке
The present study investigates word-order realizations in spoken Russian by bilingual speakers whose first languages are among the autochthonous languages of Russia, namely Daghestanian (Nakh-Daghestanian and Turkic), Siberian (Northern Samoyedic), and Far Eastern (Southern Tungusic) languages. In particular, we focus on the order of head and modifier in genitive constructions realized in spoken Russian by such bilinguals. Whereas in Standard Russian the neutral word order in genitive constructions is N + GEN, the varieties of Russian spoken in Daghestan, Siberia and the Far East often show the opposite order in such constructions, i. e., GEN + N. With the present corpus-based investigation, we aim at determining whether such variations in word order are to be interpreted as the result of syntactic calquing from 106 the speakers’ first languages (all showing GEN + N as the neutral word order in genitive constructions), or rather as a general feature of spoken Russian. To answer this question, we compare the results of the analysis of genitive constructions carried out on corpora of Russian spoken in Daghestan, Siberia and the Far East, as well as on the corpus of spoken Standard Russian of the RNC (Russian National Corpus). To understand what factors could determine the choice of a specific word order, we have analyzed our data not only based on the position of the genitive in such constructions, but also with respect to the semantics of the relation between the head noun and the genitive, the status of the genitive along the animacy scale, and the “weight” of the genitive modifier (i.e., one word vs. two or more words).