STRUCTURAL AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC FEATURES OF HILL MARI — RUSSIAN CODE SWITCHING: A PILOT STUDY

The article examines the structural features of code switching in the Hill Mari language spoken in rural communities of the Hill Mari district (Republic of Mari El). The study is based on the data of a pilot corpus of Hill Mari speech. First, informal observations on the sociolinguistic situation in the area under study are presented. The structure of the pilot corpus is described in detail as well as the annotation used and the restrictions imposed on the data. Basing on the quantitative study, I make some observations on the structural features of the Hill Mari — Russian code switching. For instance, interclausal code switching occurrences within complex sentences are rare, while code switching occurrences within prepositional phrases, adverbials, predicative adverbials and discourse markers are very frequent. Speech clichés which are rather common when occurring within switched fragments are also briefly described.