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Нестандартные количественные конструкции в русской речи носителей нанайского и ульчского языков
The paper deals with non-standard encoding of numeral phrases in a post-pidgin variety of Russian, namely in the speech of older speakers of Southern Tungusic languages (Nanai and Ulcha). Along with standard uses with the genitive (dva doma [two house.GEN.SG] ‘two houses’, pjat’ brat’ev [five brother.GEN.PL] ‘five brothers’], nonstandard nominative uses (dva dom [two house.NOM.SG] ‘two houses’, pjat’ brat’ja [five brother.NOM.PL] ‘five brothers’) are attested in their speech. These nominative constructions with numerals resemble Tungusic ones. However, some alternative hypotheses on their origin can be proposed: they might be inherited from the pidgin, from monolinguals’ dialectal speech, or be a result of incomplete acquisition of Standard Russian. Arguments in favor of structural borrowing from Tungusic come from a corpus-based quantitative study on variation. The variation between the genitive vs. nominative patterns is regulated by the semantics of the noun and the numeral: time and measure expressions, as well as expressions with large numbers tend to be encoded in a standard way. These are exactly those contexts, for which communication in Russian is more typical than communication in Tungusic; so they appear to be less affected by contact. The variation between two different nominative patterns, i.e. those with NOM.SG vs. NOM.PL (dva brat [two brother.NOM.SG] vs. dva brat’ja [two brother.NOM.PL] ‘two brothers’), is motivated by exactly the same factors as in Southern Tungusic. The data observed contribute to a more general question on contact-induced changes in grammar. They favor the idea that grammatical features of the donor language are more prone to undergo structural borrowing if they are in line with crosslinguistic tendencies and supported by general functional motivations.