Cross-Linguistic Collocations Used by Bilingual Native Speakers-A Case Study of Komi-Permyak-Russian Bilinguals

This paper deals with a particular case of native bilingualism (a situation of spontaneous acquisition of two languages in early childhood in natural linguistic environment) characteristic for speakers of the Komi-Permyak and Russian languages. The Komi-Permyak language is based on the Cyrillic script and, due to long-term contacts with the Russian language, combines the native Finno-Ugrian vocabulary and morphology with a large number of Russian borrowings. Close coexistence of the Komi-Permyak and Russian languages results in their extensive interaction and mutual influence in bilingual consciousness. The experimental research that involved free associative tests with Komi-Permyak and Russian stimuli and a sociolinguistic survey demonstrates that joining Komi-Permyak and Russian words within one phrase is a highly productive strategy for Komi-Permyak – Russian adult bilingual speakers. As long as cross-linguistic word combinations are characterized by high usage frequency both in speech perception and production, we specify them as cross-linguistic collocations – habitual, repeatedly used semantically and syntactically holistic speech units. We suppose that extensive use of cross-linguistic word-combinations (collocations among them) proves the existence of a contiguous ("fused" from the point of view of language code) zone in bilingual consciousness with elements not marked as belonging to one particular language only. Obviously, due to a high degree of formal similarity of Komi-Permyak and Russian syntactic structures, as well as to a large number of Russian borrowings in the KomiPermyak language, such elements are intuitively interpreted as interchangeable/universally referring to both languages, or none of them in particular. All facts considered, we claim that the existence of the "fused" zone of syntactic and lexical representations in bilingual mental lexicon provides the basis for extensive unintentional code-switches in bilingual speech. 1