Narrative strategy formation in the bilinguals’ stories in Russian: corpus study

Abstract

The lexical parameters of oral stories of two generations of Russian-German bilinguals and the function of lexical means in the narrative strategy implementation are describes. Through addressing the oral narrative this study is included in the range of modern works considering the features of text generation by bilinguals. The relevance of the study lies both in the material and in the chosen methods of analysis. The aim of the study is to identify the degree of the narrative strategy formation at the lexical level among representatives of two generations of Russian-German bilinguals in comparison with monolingual Russian native speakers. The research material is a corpus of experimentally collected oral stories (47 texts) of German-Russian bilinguals. M. Mayer’s book “Frog, where are you?” was used as a stimulus for subjects. The test subjects were representatives of 22 families: children - 26 people aged 8 to 19 years, parents - 21 people aged 30 to 55 years. To compare the characteristics of the corpora, the similar corpus of oral stories of monolinguals (42 stories) was involved. Quantitative and statistical analysis, corpus analysis, thematic and semantic analysis of vocabulary, elements of structural analysis of narrative were used. The novelty of the study is the corpus analysis identification of lexical parameters of narrative strategies used by two generations of bilinguals. The analysis showed that the degree of lexical skills development in the implementation of narrative strategies in bilinguals is lower than in monolinguals in both age groups, despite the statistical similarity of the texts of both corpora. This concerns, first of all, the completeness and uniformity of the lexical expression of the mandatory components of the narrative stimulated by the material, and the relations between them in the text. At the same time, the general trend of narrative creation was in line with expectations. The identified parameters can be further methodically interpreted in order to prepare educational materials for bilinguals.