SOME PECULIARITIES OF THE RUSSIAN SPEECH OF MOKSHA SPEAKERS


2020. № 4 (26), 110-131

 V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of RAS

Abstract:

 This paper deals with non-standard phenomena in the Russian speech of Moksha- Russian bilinguals which could probably be contact-induced. Moksha belongs to the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family; the data were collected in the villages of Lesnoje Tsibaevo and Lesnoje Ardashevo in 2013–2016. The sociolinguistic situation in these villages is touched upon in the article. The main focus is put on the morphosyntactic phenomena (some deviations from Standard Russian in inflection and in derivation; gender assignment and agreement; expressions of negation; differential object marking; valency patterns; encoding of locative phrases). Some examples of pattern borrowing in the lexicon are considered as well (e. g. collocational properties of motion verbs). Examples from this non-standard variety of Russian are compared with Moksha and with other Finno-Ugric languages. The comparison is also drawn with some papers dealing with the Russian speech of Erzya-Russian bilinguals (Erzya being the language the most closely related to Moksha). The data discussed in this article can be used (and further elaborated on) in developing a corpus of Russian spoken by Moksha-Russian bilinguals.