Some Features of Grammatical Transference in Tatar Bilingual Speech in Structural and Stylistic Aspects
50th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Kazan 2007
There are no languages that develop without any external influence. The outcomes of language contacts range from a few borrowing adopted by one of the languages to the extinction of a whole language.
In the republic of Tatarstan the Tatar and Russian languages have coexisted for a very long time, with the Russian language dominating the life and linguistic scene. Nowadays the Tatar and Russian languages are established as two equal state languages.
However, the Russian language has had a great influence on the Tatar language which has been undergoing some changes not only in the lexical system but in its morphology and syntax as well. The Tatar language in its pure form is preserved in rural areas and in the speech of elderly people. Inhabitants of big industrial cities are bilingual. The language behaviour of Tatar bilinguals can be characterized as extremely heterogeneous. There are groups that practise code switching according to a situational context, and they can easily switch from Tatar to Russian without noticeable signs of transference. But the prevailing pattern is code mixture which mostly affects the Tatar language. Phrases and sentences produced by such bilinguals are made of Russian and Tatar words organized mostly according to the rules of the Tatar morphological system. In some cases even the Tatar morphology is violated under the influence of the Russian grammar.
Structurally and genetically Russian and Tatar are distant languages, Russian being inflectional and Tatar agglutinative. In comparison with phonetic and lexical systems which are most easily affected by external influence, grammatical categories and structures tend to resist alterations, though evidence of such influence was pointed out by J. Vendryes in his work “Language”.
On the whole the variant used by the majority of bilinguals in oral communication has the following conspicuous features of transference: mixture of forms, complete substitution of grammatical and lexical elements, and redundancy of grammatical forms.
The mixture of forms can be observed when Russian words are organized in speech with the help of Tatar agglutinative affixes expressing location, duration, time, possessiveness, etc.: *gorod – qa (to town), *shkol-da (at school), *mama-si (his/her mother). A great number of occasional forms are coined in speech with the help of the Tatar link verb “itw” (to do) and the Russian infinitive stem.
As for substitution, Tatar conjunctions, parenthetical words and phrases, and modal words are replaces by corresponding Russian items. Nowadays few people, mostly those who have a command of the literary variant of Tatar, use such Tatar conjunctions as ham (and), lakin (but), cenki (because) in their speech.
Redundancy characterizes the formation of the comparative degree of adjectives and syntactical structures of complex sentences. The Tatar comparative suffix – raq/rak is added to the Russian suppletive comparative adjective form. In complex sentences bilinguals use both the Russian conjunction of condition and purpose and Tatar affixes of the same meaning.
Nowadays some structures which occur in speech of some bilinguals testify to a greater influence of the Russian language on the Tatar morphological structure. Thus, a conspicuous and differentiating feature of Tatar as an agglutinative language is its fixed indirect word order: S-O-P, and the modal verb following the infinitive. This order tends to be altered in the speech of bilinguals who can produce sentences with Russian modal verbs preceding the Tatar infinitive.
The reasons for such changes may be different, political and economic factors being crucial ones. However, these linguistic phenomena are not present-day creations. The Russians and Tatars have been neighbours for many centuries and such contacts are sure to find their reflection in the language. Moreover, the Russian influence on the Tatar language has been accepted by the Tatar community as reality and mirrored in Tatar literature. The stylistic value of the mixture of Russian and Tatar elements, various types of code switching, and misunderstanding of forms based on phonetic similarity between Tatar and Russian word forms was recognized in Tatar literature long ago; it goes back to the Tatar classics (G. Camal). It was widely used as a means of speech characterization in the works by G. Bashirov and M. Mahdiev and other modern writers.