Syntactic features of Russian speech of two generations of bilinguals and monolinguals: a complex sentence

Abstract

The study is devoted to the syntactic characteristics of the Russian speech at the level of a complex sentence of two generations of Russian-German bilinguals: the speakers of inherited Russian, aged 10-15, who were born in Germany or came to Germany at an early age, and their parents, aged 35-50, who moved to Germany in 1990-2010, and the Russian monolinguals of the same age, living in Russia. The relevance of the study is due to the importance of exploring complex sentences in oral speech, as well as the need to analyze the syntactic level of Russian speech of the inherited language speakers. The aim of the study is to analyze the deviations in using complex sentences in the stories of two generations of Russian-German bilinguals and to compare them with similar deviations in the stories of Russian monolinguals. Research material: transcripts of story recordings based on pictures from the book “Frog, where are you?” by M. Mayer. Linguistic observation, descriptive, statistical and comparative methods were applied. The average share of deviations from syntactic norms in the informants' stories was revealed, the violations were ranked according to their structural types. The most typical deviations, connected with the organization of a complex sentence parts, the use of connective and correlative words, were established. It is noted, that the speech of children has much more deviations from syntactic norms, than the speech of their parents. This fact is explained by a higher level of education of parents. In the speech of bilinguals, more deviations from syntactic norms were revealed than in the speech of monolinguals, which is caused by the different status of the Russian language in Germany and Russia. The conclusion is made about the perspective of the structural approach to the analysis of the syntactic features of the oral speech of different categories of Russian native speakers at the level of a complex sentence.