NON-STANDARD USE OF PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES IN THE RUSSIAN SPEECH OF NORTHERN SAMOYEDIC SPEAKERS

The paper deals with the non-standard use of prepositional phrases in the Russian speech of Northern Samoyedic speakers (Nganasan, Forest Enets, Tundra Enets and Tundra Nenets) based on the corpus of contact-influenced Russian of Northern Siberia and the Russian Far East (http://web-corpora.net/wsgi3/ruscontact/search). Prepositional phrases are likely to be used in a non-standard way, since Samoyedic languages are left-branching and have postpositions. Non-standard uses of prepositional phrases include the use of a prepositional phrase instead of the expected noun phrase and the use of a non-standard preposition. I also discuss non-standard realizations of prepositional phrases, which include the use of a noun phrase instead of the expected prepositional phrase, non-standard marking within a prepositional phrase, and preposition drop. The aim of this study is twofold. First, I conduct a qualitative analysis and provide several reasons for the described non-standard use and realization of prepositional phrases: they can be accounted for by the influence of the Samoyedic grammatical rules and by contamination with Russian or by general underacquisition. Second, I conduct a quantitative analysis of preposition drop, in particular the statistical analysis of the most frequently omitted preposition v ‘in’. This preposition is most often dropped with expressions denoting prototypical localization (mostly with temporal expressions, but also with “typical” locations, such as settlements, topographic objects, place names, etc.). Speakers with primary or secondary education are much more likely to omit prepositions than those with higher education.