RUSSIAN NUMERALS IN HILL MARI SPEECH

This paper deals with the occurrences of Russian numerals in the spontaneous speech of Hill Mari-Russian bilinguals. We propose an analysis in terms of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) Model, basing on the corpus study of the numeral phrases with code-switching in Hill Mari. The data come from spoken corpus collected in the village of Kuznetsovo and its surroundings in the Mari El Republic in 2016–2018. In Hill Mari numerals are attested in matrix language (Hill Mari) islands and in embedded (Russian) language islands, as well as in mixed (ML+EL) constituents. Ordinal numerals in the masculine form instead of the feminine one (e.g. pervyj smena ‘first.mshift.f’) are analyzed as ML+EL constituents, but not as embedded language islands, contrary to some previous accounts. Moreover, the correlation between the syntactic type of numerals and their arithmetic meaning and the form of a numeral is detected: bigger numerals tend to be used in their Russian form; Russian ordinal numerals are used more than Russian cardinal and collective numerals, which confirms the existing hierarchies of borrowing numerals proposed by Matras and the data on some Finno- Ugric languages.