PREPOSITION DROP IN MARI AND BESERMAN RUSSIAN BILINGUALS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

The paper is devoted to the preposition drop in Russian spoken by Beserman Udmurt and Meadow Mari bilingual speakers in comparison with monolingual Russian speakers. Based on the three oral corpora, I created and annotated a database of contexts containing a prepositional phrase with the preposition v (‘in’). The patterns of preposition drop in the speech of bilinguals and monolinguals differ significantly: monolinguals omit the preposition almost exclusively in one lexicalized introductory phrase, whereas the speech of bilinguals shows the omission of prepositions in a wide variety of contexts. This paper suggests that the probability of preposition drop in the speech of Beserman and Mari bilinguals may be due to interference with the phonetic systems of their native languages. In addition, there is a large variability among bilingual speakers; senior age and low level of education presumably increase the probability of preposition drop, but our data are insufficient to confirm or refute these assumptions statistically.