Concessive Constructions Based on RLC Data

This diploma research the problem of concessiveness in Russian heritage language. The main goal of it is to understand the influence on heritage language by dominant language, find what mistakes students usually do and which regularities exist. Heritage language is a mother-tongue that one person used to speak in her childhood but after a flit to another country stopped using it regularly and was replaced by another one (dominant language). Heritage language studies is a young area. It exists no more than twenty years and still gains material. Even considering that some common and essential parts are found there are a great part of smaller points that was not observed. The work started with from downloading the material from RLC and making another little corpus. The new corpus consists of both right and wrong examples containing concesiveness. Each wrong case was analyzed and provided with some hypotheses of why the mistake happened and in what way it could be influenced. Now we can see clearly the semantic problems (confusing with constructions ‘хотя бы’ and ‘хоть бы’ which are not synonyms and understanding of usage of ‘несмотря на’ and ‘независимо от’). Students also have a tendency to create new constructions from existing conjunctions and constructions (for example ‘хоть где бы ни’) despite the fact none of the systems has such constructions. Heritage speakers tend to use ‘хоть’ instead of ‘хотя‘. And there is a common tendency to use short form ‘хоть’ instead of ‘хотя бы’ in sentences where replacement is possible. English speakers usually have problems with constructions containing ‘ли’.