EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF ESTONIAN CALQUES BY RUSSIAN NATIVE SPEAKERS (ON BASIS OF ACQUISITION VERBS)

Abstract

The article provides a discussion about such problems as hidden entry of calques into a recipient language, insufficient development of collocative norms, and basic limitations of language norms, which particularly impedes verification of collocations and potential calques according to norms. As an alternative to language norms and corpora, which can be considered their modern analogue, a linguistic experiment is proposed in the article, the main idea of which is artificial creation of Estonian calques in Russian language with their subsequent evaluation by Russian native speakers. Presumably these calques had to be easily identified by competitive native speakers, such as students of language programs from RUDN University, which was confirmed by experiment’s results. However, in few cases calques were evaluated as acceptable collocations. Taking into consideration the language skills of respondents and the quantity of questionnaires (81 items), the results received can’t be a mistake and should be researched separately. The article describes the process of artificial calques’ creation, the selection process of respondents, the protocol of conducting the experiment, as well as the primary interpretation of experiment’s results. In general, the experiment described in the article proposes an original view on the research of calquing process and varification of collocative normativity, which can be especially useful in the theory and practice of foreign language teaching.