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Морфосинтаксические тенденции финско-русских двуязычных студентов: Корпусный анализ нарушений в предложно-падежном управлении
This paper reports the results of corpus-based study, which investigates underlying factors of morphosyntactic errors made by Russian-Finnish heritage students, well-known for simplification of grammar due to incomplete acquisition and influence of the dominant language. This research focuses on the prepositional phrase, which exhibits variation in case government across Russian dialects, registers, and vernaculars, for example the use of the Genitive instead of the Prepositional: закон о *выборов instead of о выбор-ах. The research method combines a comparative study of morphosyntax in Russian and Finnish with a corpus-based approach, which supports linguistic analysis with frequency data revealing directions of morphosyntactic change induced by the language contact.
Although Finnish and Russian are both languages with sophisticated case systems, they considerably diverge with regard to the structure of adpositional phrase. The Finnish adpositional phrase, with prevalence of postpositions, contains Genitive or Partitive, functionally equivalent to the Russian Genitive, whereas the Russian prepositional phrase comprises more than 56 combinations of the most common prepositions and different case forms. The proportional analysis of errors, documented in the Russian Learner Corpus, shows that the Russian-Finnish heritage speakers demonstrate high propensity towards overuse of Genitive in the prepositional phrase, which is a transfer of the Finnish adpositional pattern. This phenomenon also leads to the symmetrical mixture of oblique forms. The most common type of error is a mixture of Genitive and Prepositional cases, which is a wide-spread phenomenon across Russian non-standard varieties. Another common type of errors is a mixture of Genitive and Instrumental, and these errors are specific only for the Russian-Finnish speakers. It is notable that mixture of case forms primarily concerns the oblique forms, and a loss of case government, or the use of unmarked Nominative form, rarely occurs in the Finnish-Russian bilingual data.