ОТРАЖЕНИЕ БИЛИНГВИЗМА У ДЕТЕЙ ДОШКОЛЬНОГО ВОЗРАСТА, ГОВОРЯЩИХ НА РОДНОМ (ЭРЗЯНСКОМ) И НЕРОДНОМ (РУССКОМ) ЯЗЫКАХ

The attention to language acquisition in the state of bilingualism has recently been growing (Bhatia 2004). The most important issue in relation to the development of children’s bilingualism is the relationship between two language systems [5], [4].

Interference is a change in the structure or components of the structure of one language under the influence of another language, the violation of rules of how these languages contact by a bilingual person, which is reflected in the speech as a divergence from the norm, and it does not matter whether it is a speaker’s native language, mother tongue, or the second language acquired later.

In oral everyday communication the speech interference appears sometimes in the use of whole structures. In this case, there are three main cases, when regarding to the mother tongue, the elements of the non-native language: 1) take the form of the native language (which can be considered as the actual interference), 2) are used in the wrong, mainly the initial form, and 3) preserve the form of a non-native language. This is the kind of reflection of bilingualism in a particular environment of the representatives of some social and professional groups, as well as in the speech of children who start speaking their native and non-native language.

The interference is manifested at different levels of a language: phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and so on. In the area of ​​syntax the interference is described as the transfer of language syntax sentence structure from one language to another. Most often this is the transfer of non-native syntactic model, so called syntax calquing.

In the morphology the interference appears mainly indirectly. The phenomenon of transition of rules of accidence from one of the contact languages ​​into another is quite rare. It is observed in the numerically small bilingual group, which experiences the influence of the group speaking different language and which has been more powerful in economic, political and cultural terms during a long period а time.

In the vocabulary the manifestation of interference is primarily considers as the transfer of lexical items from one language into another. In this case it can be the transfer of both simple and complex words and phrases.

The basis of the experiment are the stories of Erzya children in pictures without words, namely the so-called ‘history of the frog’ “Frog, where are you?” by Mercer Mayer, which is well known in the onto-linguistics. The age range of the selected group of 16 bilingual children was from 3 to 7 year old, and each age group consisted of several respondents [3].

According to the analysis the lexical interference is represented in the language of children as a direct transfer of words from Russian into Erzya without semantic expansion. More often there are nouns which are the names of living creatures ones related to them, for example: frog, boy, moose, owl, deer.

L’aguškat’n’e čijn’it’, višin’kat i pokšt ‘The frogs are running, big and small’. 

A large group consists of the words with the meaning related to household, clothes, shoes, and so on, such as: jar, lamp, slippers, blanket, house, chair, shirt, bottle, bed.

Kiskas’ tov tus’, domikis ‘The dog there went, into the house’.

Along with the nouns the interference also influences other parts of speech, such as adverbs, conjunctions, and verbs. Most frequently there is a direct transfer from Russian verbs:

Sin’ mol’s’t’ virev i zablud’il’is’ ‘They went to the forest and got lost’.

The manifestation of the interference in grammar is one of the most complex and controversial issues in linguistics. According to scholars the influence of one language on another in the field of grammar is often difficult to determine. One type of grammatical interference is a grammatical adaptation of lexical units transferred from one language to another. This phenomenon is very well represented in the speech of children. Most Russian lexemes transferred into Erzya, especially nouns, are marked by the possessive and case suffixes, and suffixes of definite declension of the Erzya language.

Sin’ tus’t’ l’aguškan’t’ vešn’em’e. ‘They went looking for the frog (Akk.Def.)’.

Verbs are not exposed to the adaptation while being transferred.

Kiskas’ t’ej hočet kuz’ems ‘The dog wants to climb here’.

In the speech of bilingual children the most common word order is Subject – Object – Verb, which is not typical for the Erzya language, but possible for Russian. For the Erzya language the typical word order is Subject – Verb – Object [2].

A kiskas’ (S) puromotn’en’ (O) tandavtn’i (V) ‘And the dog is frightening the wasps’.

The analysis shows that the most evident cases of interference in the speech of bilingual children can be found on the lexical level, which results in smaller vocabulary and leads to a direct transfer of Russian lexemes, especially nouns into the Erzya language. The influence of the Russian language also happens on the syntactic level, namely such word order as subject - object - verb, which is not typical for the Erzya language. As for the morphological and morphosyntactic levels, we have revealed the features associated with the impact of the Erzya language on the Russian one, namely grammatical adaptation of lexical units transferred from one language to the other. Moreover, the nouns transferred into the Erzya language are marked by possessive, case suffixes, and suffixes of certain declension.