Abstract:

The paper is focused on ways of spatial relationships are expressed in written texts of bilinguals. In particular, I consider how the bilinguals choose Russian prepositions, verbs, and adverbs.

The main method of the research is comparative: I compare Kazakh and Russian which have different systems of the spatial markers as well as examples of using of the Russian elements by the Kazakh bilinguals. I use also a few corpora data: Kazakh sub-corpus of the Russian Learner Corpus (there are the Russian texts written by Kazakh students: http://www.web-corpora.net/RLC), the Russian National Corpus (http://www.ruscorpora.ru), Almaty Corpus of Kazakh (http://www.web-corpora.net/KazakhCorpus/search) and corpora of the Sketch Engine (https://www.sketchengine.eu).

When the bilinguals choose lexical and grammatical items of L2, that is not only a transfer of their dominant language. Violations of bilinguals’ speech can be their non-standard reinterpretation of semantic and functional features of L2 elements. For example, Russian has three elative prepositions s, ot, iz (‘from’, ‘out of’). The RLC data shows that the Kazakh bilinguals often prefer to choose the preposition ot:

(1) … pust' molodozheny zaberut svoikh roditeley ot domov prestarelykh.

(2) Chitaya knig ya voydu v drugoy mir i ne khochetsya ot nego vyyti…

I explain this fact that the Russian preposition ot doesn’t express the topological type of the landmark (container or surface). This feature matches Kazakh case forms which express only semantic role (qala-dan – city-ABL ‘from the city’) but don’t express the topological type of the landmark as in Russian (iz gorod-a – out of city-GEN ‘from the city’). However, in this situation, the Kazakh bilinguals ignore own semantics of the preposition ot – near of the landmark. They assess Russian ot+Genetive similar Kazakh Ablative case.

In the paper, I will consider such cases of the reinterpretation of the Russian elements which can be a helpful addition to research of Kazakh-Russian bilingualism.