Collocations and near-native competence: Lexical strategies of heritage speakers of Russian

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study on the use of frequency-based probabilistic word combinations in Heritage Russian. The data used in the study are drawn from three small corpora of narratives, representing the language of Russian heritage speakers from three different dominant-language backgrounds, namely German, Finnish, and American English. The elicited narratives are based on video clips that the participants saw before the recording. Since the current study is based on a relatively small corpus, we conducted a manual corpus-based analysis of the heritage corpora and an automated analysis of the baseline (monolingual) corpus to investigate the differences between the heritage and monolingual language varieties. We hypothesize that heritage speakers deploy fewer probabilistic strategies in language production compared with native speakers and that their active knowledge of and access to ready-to-use multiword units are restricted compared with native speakers. When they cannot access a single lexical item or a collocation, heritage speakers are able to tap both into the resources of the dominant language and the resources of their home language. The connection to the dominant language results in transfer-based non-standard word combinations; when heritage speakers tap into the resources of their home language, they produce unattested in the monolingual variety, “heritage” collocations, many of which are nevertheless grammatically legitimate.