Incomplete Acquisition American Russian

Abstract

Abstract: This paper has two main goals: (i) to provide a description of the language of incomplete learners of Russian living in the U.S. and (ii) to identify across-the-board differences between a full language and an incompletely learned language. Most data used here come from American Russian, a reduced and reanalyzed version of Russian spoken in the U.S. by those speakers who became English-dominant in childhood. Incomplete acquirers of Russian demonstrate significant intra-group variation, which corresponds to similar variation found among incomplete learners of other languages. However, there are a number of structural properties that are shared by American Russian speakers regardless of their proficiency level and that distinguish their language from the baseline variety of Russian. American Russian therefore cannot be defined solely on geographical grounds; it differs significantly from varieties of Russian spoken by subjects who maintain language competence appropriate to uninterrupted acquisition. The paper also demonstrates a correlation between vocabulary deficiency and gaps in the grammar of American Russian. Such a correlation suggests a compact method of estimating incomplete acquirers' proficiency based on a concise lexical test. 1. Introduction This paper examines the morphosyntactic consequences of incomplete acquisition for language structure. (1) Let me say from the outset that the descriptive aspect of this paper is unquestionably its most important one, as incompletely acquired languages have received little coverage in linguistic literature, and I hope that this paper will serve to fill a small part of that gap. In addition to describing an incompletely acquired system, I address the interaction between language-particular and cross-linguistic phenomena under incomplete acquisition. I also demonstrate the correlation between lexical attrition on the one hand, and attrition in morphology and syntax on the other. This correlation allows me to propose a vocabulary-based method of measuring language attrition. The crucial data introduced here come from instances of lexical, morphological, and syntactic attrition as they occur in one particular language, American Russian. American Russian is compared to the full version of Modern Russian. As the two languages are compared, it becomes clear that American Russian is not just an offshoot of the Russian spoken in the language metropoly (the place where Russian is the sole or dominant language). Rather, it is a language in its own right, and while some of its properties may be viewed as caricatures of the trends already apparent in the language of the metropoly, many other traits are idiosyncratic and cannot be derived from the full version of Modern Russian. The paper has the following structure: in Section 2 I discuss the basic concepts used in the paper, introduce the elicitation techniques used in this study, and describe the speakers of American Russian interviewed for this study. Some salient lexical properties of American Russian are reviewed in Section 3. Section 4 presents and analyzes structural characteristics of American Russian in nominal morphology, and Section 5 discusses verbal categories. Section 6 summarizes the main characteristics of American Russian in syntax and discourse. Section 7 demonstrates the correlation between lexical and morphological/syntactic attrition, concluding that the proposed method of measuring lexical proficiency can reveal the general level of language competence. The major findings of the paper are summarized in the conclusion. 2. American Russianad Its Spedcers 2.1. Baic Notion This paper examines American Russian, a language variety that is endangered in that it is unlikely to stay around for generations, but does not come to mind as obviously endangered because it is associated with the healthy varieties of Russian spoken in Russia and in the growing Russian diaspora. …