Grammatical gender and number in the speech of Turkic-Russian bilinguals: interference or intra-linguistic tendencies?

Abstract

The article presents the results of the study of specific variants of interference in the Slavic-Turkic language contact, namely the deviations from the norms of gender and number expression in the Russian speech of Turkic-Russian bilinguals, with fundamentally different ratio in the grammatical systems of the contacting languages. The Slavic and Turkic languages are typologically different (inflectional synthetic VS agglutinative) in their grammatical categories, types of intercategorical interaction, configurations of particular grammatical meanings and their formal markers within the same categories. The Slavic and Turkic languages are in close intense contact, which results in multiple variants of interference in the speech of the bilingual speakers. The authors have analysed the speech (about 140,000 words) of 22 respondents, aged from 23 to 81, with their education level ranging from primary to higher, to conclude that the differences in the grammatical structures of the interacting languages influence the number of grammatical errors in L2: 1) errors in the use of the grammatical gender prevail in all syntactic positions, due to its absence in the native Turkic languages of the bilinguals; 2) differences in the structure of grammatical number in the contacting languages resulted in the prevailing deviations from the speech standard in the use of number forms of material and collective nouns; 3) the variability of the particular grammatical meanings of the masculine, feminine and neuter genders in Russian resulted in the fact that the masculine gender, which is the unmarked member of the gender opposition, proved to prevail in all syntactic positions, except the coordination relation of the linking verb in compound predicates; 4) interference phenomena interact with current trends in the development of the Russian language, as well as with the spontaneous character of oral speech.