Abstract
This paper presents an exploratory study on the use of frequency-based probabilistic word combinations in Heritage Russian. The data used in the study are drawn from three small corpora of narratives, representing the language of Russian heritage speakers from three different dominant-language backgrounds, namely German, Finnish, and American English. The elicited narratives are based on video clips that the participants saw before the recording. Since the current study is based on a relatively small corpus, we conducted a manual corpus-based analysis of the heritage corpora and an automated analysis of the baseline (monolingual) corpus to investigate the differences between the heritage and monolingual language varieties. We hypothesize that heritage speakers deploy fewer probabilistic strategies in language production compared with native speakers and that their active knowledge of and access to ready-to-use multiword units are restricted compared with native speakers. When they cannot access a single lexical item or a collocation, heritage speakers are able to tap both into the resources of the dominant language and the resources of their home language. The connection to the dominant language results in transfer-based non-standard word combinations; when heritage speakers tap into the resources of their home language, they produce unattested in the monolingual variety, “heritage” collocations, many of which are nevertheless grammatically legitimate.
Highlights
Heritage language is commonly defined as an individual’s first language that is acquired in the context of another dominant language (Benmamoun et al, 2013; Kupisch & Rothman, 2016; Polinsky & Kagan, 2007; Scontras et al, 2015)
Using quantitative and descriptive qualitative methods, we investigate heritage collocations produced by three groups of speakers of Russian dominant in American English, Finnish, and German, respectively
This step is often omitted in the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) studies that are available, we find it crucial to our agenda: the point of our analysis is not to identify the differences between the heritage and the monolingual collocations, but to identify those from the heritage data that have frequently used colloquial counterparts in the monolingual corpus. At this stage of analysis, the noun phrases (NPs) and verb phrases (VPs) that were not attested in the Russian National corpus (RNC) sub-corpus were considered heritage collocations and were taken up for further qualitative analysis. This analysis was guided by considerations of the possible nature of the heritage collocations: Could we identify traces of influence of the dominant language? Could we identify the influence of other structures of the heritage language that impact the production of a collocation at hand? Did the dominant language features and the heritage language features appear to mutually influence a creation of a novel construction? A detailed account of the procedures and the analysis included in this step is presented in the ‘‘Data analysis’’ section, below
Summary
Heritage language is commonly defined as an individual’s first (home) language that is acquired in the context of another dominant language (Benmamoun et al, 2013; Kupisch & Rothman, 2016; Polinsky & Kagan, 2007; Scontras et al, 2015). Keywords Heritage language, Russian, English, German, Finnish, collocations, lexical strategies
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