A NON-STANDARD CHOICE OF ACCENT-HOLDER IN RUSSIAN SPEECH OF BILINGUALS: THE DATA FROM NANAI AND ULCHA SPEAKERS

The paper deals with patterns of phrasal prosody attested in the Russian speech of bilingual speakers of Nanai and Ulcha (Southern Tungusic, Khabarovsk Krai). I used the data of the corpus of contact-infl uenced Russian speech of Northern Siberia and the Russian Far East, developed by our research team. The practical aim of the study was to check the annotation of non-standard prosodic patterns implemented in the corpus. The detailed analysis of corpus examples and comparison to the textual data of Nanai and Ulcha shows that the annotation needs improving and more detalization. For instance, some examples tagged as “non-standard accent-holder choice” might be interpreted in another way. A theoretical aim of the study was to revise and classify the full inventory of non-standard prosodic patterns attested in the corpus and to trace to which extent they copy the corresponding Tungusic patterns. The most frequent case attested in the corpus is a non-standard choice of accent-holder. In this case, the intonation is more or less the same as expected in monolinguals’ speech, and the phrasal accent takes a non-typical position; cf., for instance: Это в Охотском\ море где-то ‘This is somewhere in the Sea of Okhotsk’ instead of: Это в Охотском море\ где-то ‘This is somewhere in the Sea of Okhotsk’; Мы хорошо жили\ ‘We lived well’ instead of: Мы хорошо\ жили ‘We lived well’. Some non-standard intonation patterns attested in Russian speech of Tungusic-Russian bilinguals might be interpreted as inheriting Tungusic prosody. However, one deals not with a simple structural copying but rather with more complex processes of prosodic accommodation.