MARKING OF ITERATIVE IN RUSSIAN SPEECH OF KAZAKH SPEAKERS

The paper is focused on how Russian written texts of Kazakh speakers deal with iterative meanings (those describing regularly repeated events). The results are based on Kazakh subcorpus of Russian Learner Corpus (RLC) and on a series of interviews with bilingual speakers.

The system of iterative constructions found in the RLC texts is compared with the standard Kazakh and Russian systems which may serve as a base for the authors of these texts. The standard systems are considered to be represented in Almaty Corpus of Kazakh Language [http://web-corpora.net/KazakhCorpus] and Russian National Corpus [http:// ruscorpora.ru], respectively.

Both Kazakh and Russian express repeated events with the help of a special verbal marking (like imperfective aspect in Russian, or biverbal construction in Kazakh) supplemented by an adverbial as part of the same construction (adverb, converb or temporal clause). Each language chooses its own way to avoid double marking of this kind.

Bilinguals tend to overcome the restrictions imposed by standard systems and systematically create new principles of iterative marking. Interference and simplification of standard rules are factors which form an “intermediate” system used by Kazakh bilin- guals within the loci of possible variation.

Our findings indirectly contribute also to revealing some problematic fragments of the system of iterative expressions in Russian, where variation and instability are most conspicuous.