Predicative Syntax: Norm and Deviance of Free Speech (Based on the Buryat Language)

Abstract

Nowadays, the problem of bilingualism and polylingualism requires a more thorough and accurate study, especially in cases when one of the languages has the status of a minority language, such as the Buryat language. Interdisciplinary research into this field can help to understand not only the speech production mechanism, but also the issues of language preservation. The purpose of this paper was to, on the one hand, explicate the relationship between the interlanguage codes in the aspect of Russian influence on the position of the predicate in the spoken language of Buryat-Russian and Russian-Buryat bilinguals and, on the other hand, shed some light on the relationship between internal and external syntax. The latter constitutes the novelty of the research. As the material, the author used transcripts of spoken discourse in the Buryat language produced by Buryat and Russian bilinguals at the television shows Duunei Zam and Toli-Shuud. The research methodology included three stages: 1) theoretical substantiation of the problem; 2) description of the word order in the Buryat and Russian languages; 3) syntactic discourse analysis of the material in terms of predicate functioning. The analysis showed that the Russian free word order influences the predicate’s position in the Buryat speech of Russian-Buryat bilinguals. The results confirmed the principle of the usage-based model of grammatical knowledge representation, according to which the frequency of the use of grammatical forms and structures plays an important role in solidifying grammatical knowledge. The paper contributes to the research into deviant syntax (with a change of proposition) due to a mismatch between bilinguals’ preverbal and verbal syntax.