Upast na Polu vs Upast na Pol: Abnormal Target-Marking in the Written Production of Non-Standard Russian Speakers: Evidence from the Russian Learner Corpus

Recent studies dedicated to the Russian case system acquisition among non-standard speakers have described a wide range of erroneous Russian case government in different Russian language variants. Still, the abnormal target-marking in prepositional-case constructions and its origin remain almost undescribed. Moreover, it is unknown whether the mechanism of error occurrence is the same for students with heritage Russian and students studying Russian as a foreign language. Our material is a sample of 864 examples, compiled on the basis of the Finnish subcorpora of the RLC corpora. The texts were written by native Finnish speakers and heritage Russian speakers with dominant Finnish. Combining the methods of corpus linguistics, quantitative methods and the theory of second language acquisition, as well as methods of modern linguistics, we tried to explain the mechanisms of violations associated with the abnormal use of prepositional case constructions in the speech of non-standard speakers. In this work, we tested the hypothesis that foreign students and heritage students make extensive generalizations related to the spatial relations of objects, while these generalizations differ in groups in situations of different semantic domains. We attempted to determine which of the marking anomalies are random and which are a stable trend. One of the most significant results was the following observation: for inophones, the expansion of the locative group is typical, while for heritage speakers, typical is overuse of the directive group with the accusative. Among the common phenomena that unite the heritage and foreign students, we noted the difficulty in expressing spatial meanings marked in standard Russian with the combination of po + DATIVE and associated with multidirectional movement within the object. The confusion of spatial prepositional-case constructions in basic and high-frequency verbs of movement or the most frequent statal verbs is characteristic of foreign speakers who study Russian as a foreign language. Violations develop in both directions: locative prepositional constructions are used almost equally with verbs of directed movement / displacement and directive constructions for predicates of static action, while there is a slight preponderance towards the expansion of locative groups. It is important that this type of violation is almost not characteristic of heritage speakers: the number of documented abnormalities is minimal, and this is an indicator that the ways of marking basic values associated with space and movement are a stable phenomenon in the speech of heritage speakers with dominant Finnish. Our work visualized that only inophones are characterized by violations in situations that describe communication and different visual images. The number of violations in the inophones is sharply higher than in the heritage students, in situations that describe the connection and the point of contact, impact and influence, as well as the part-whole relationship. Finally, the instability in the choice of the locative / directive group when marking spatial values in compositional constructions with two or more prepositional combinations was noted, which is typical for foreign students but not typical for heritage students. The most difficult contexts for heritage speakers are vertical position and hierarchical relationships, the endpoint and end of the action, focus, and concentration.