NON-STANDARD WORD ORDER IN DAGHESTANIAN RUSSIAN: NOUN PHRASES WITH THE GENITIVE

This paper is devoted to the effects of language contact in the field of word order. Based on corpus material, we analyze word order in genitive phrases in the spoken Russian variety of bilinguals from Daghestan. In this variety of Russian the preposition of the genitive in noun phrases (Zairy brat ‘Zaira’s brother’) is very frequent, whereas this is not typical of monolinguals’ Russian. This phenomenon can be explained as the result of contact with the speakers’ L1s, in which the genitive dependent in noun phrases is usually preposed to the head. However, the specific factors regulating word order in Daghestanian Russian cannot be explained exclusively in terms of L1 calquing. A quantitative analysis of corpus data shows that left genitives are preferred when the genitive phrase expresses a kinship or age relation, when the genitive dependent is a kinship term and when it is multiword. These factors affect word order in noun phrases with the genitive according to the following hierarchy: semantic relation between the head and the genitive dependent > semantics of the genitive dependent > length of the genitive dependent. Other relevant factors are the position of the genitive along the animacy scale (human referents) and its referential status (definite noun phrases).