Leiden University Student Repository

Osmova, Evgeniia (2023)

Word Order Patterns in Heritage Russian: The Interplay of Information Structure and (In)Definiteness

Bachelor thesis | Taalwetenschap (BA)

This thesis is a pilot study investigating the influence of Information Structure on naturalness of (non-)canonical word order permutations among Russian Heritage speakers residing in mainland Portugal. The obtained word order patterns are compared to the data collected from a homogenous group of monolingual Russian speakers from St Petersburg. The thesis in particular focuses on whether (in)definiteness plays a role in the distribution of extralinguistic information (TOPIC/FOCUS) in Heritage Russian. Through short dialogue recordings of Colloquial Russian, ratings of Subject FOCUS and Object FOCUS are elicited amongst the two participant groups, as part of the acceptability judgement task. It was hypothesised that Russian Heritage Speakers would map Word Order based on Information Structure similar to L1/1 speakers of Russian. For Subject and IO FOCUS sentences, the obtained results indicate that Russian Heritage speakers are non-target like. Russian Heritage speakers transfer the...Show moreThis thesis is a pilot study investigating the influence of Information Structure on naturalness of (non-)canonical word order permutations among Russian Heritage speakers residing in mainland Portugal. The obtained word order patterns are compared to the data collected from a homogenous group of monolingual Russian speakers from St Petersburg. The thesis in particular focuses on whether (in)definiteness plays a role in the distribution of extralinguistic information (TOPIC/FOCUS) in Heritage Russian. Through short dialogue recordings of Colloquial Russian, ratings of Subject FOCUS and Object FOCUS are elicited amongst the two participant groups, as part of the acceptability judgement task. It was hypothesised that Russian Heritage Speakers would map Word Order based on Information Structure similar to L1/1 speakers of Russian. For Subject and IO FOCUS sentences, the obtained results indicate that Russian Heritage speakers are non-target like. Russian Heritage speakers transfer the preference for VOS/SV DO IO order from European Portuguese as opposed to Russian OVS/S DO V IO.Show less

Word Order

Heritage Language

Information Structure

Definiteness

Russian

European Portuguese

Author

Osmova, Evgeniia

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Language and Cognition

Supervisors

Cheng, L.L.

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en