Referential Choice in Subordinate Clauses in Native and L2 Russian Speakers

There is an intricate system of choosing a reference strategy to express a subject, already familiar from previous context. This diversity appears to cause mistakes in oral and written speech of non-standard Russian speakers , namely L2 and heritage speakers. While most of the publications on the choice of referential devices in L2 and heritage Russian study this topic from discourse perspective, reference strategies between the main and subordinate clauses, seem to not have been studied enough. The research questions of the present study address furthering the knowledge on the previous work by making an extensive description of the referencial choice in native and non-standard speakers of Russian. To meet the goals of this research there were conducted two experiments. The first one was an acceptability judgement task, and was conducted with 56 native speakers. The second one was a close test, conducted with 34 non-standard speakers and 190 native speakers. The data collected during these experiments were computationally analysed and visualised. The research revealed that there is a certain pattern of referential choice in native speakers’ language view, which is to do with explicacy scale of referencial devices: it is prefered that a more expicit referencial device should not follow a less explicit one, if both of them refer to the same subject. This revelation is in line with the literature on reference and referencial choice. In non-standard speakers’ language view, however, there is no concept of this pattern, and neither clause order nor the referencial device in the main clause do affect their referential choice. There also have been made an explicit description of acceptable and non-acceptable constructions, based on combinations of referencial devices and clause order types.