On the parallel syntactic processes in West Slavic insular dialects in Siberia

The paper deals with similar syntactic features seen in one Czech and two Polish immigrant dialects, which are still spoken in Siberia. The Czech dialect is used in three villages in the Middle Irtysh area of Omsk Oblast, and the Polish ones in two villages in Krasnoyarsk Krai and in the Republic of Khakassia, and in one village in Irkutsk Oblast. Besides that, an idiolect of the last user of the Polish patois formerly spoken in one village located in Tomsk Oblast is taken into consideration. Despite the fact that each of those varieties has already been described in dialectological works by Russian and Polish (less by Czech) researchers, their resemblance at the syntactic level which occurred due to the contacts with common Russian, as well as with its regional forms has not become an object of attention until now. The author analyses such features as: 1) impersonal constructions, especially with infinitives and modal predicates like nado/nuzno 'it is needed', borrowed from Russian; 2) other deagentive constructions, both formally personal and impersonal, i.a. reflexive and participle constructions of different types (among the latter those ones which were probably influenced by Russian dialects spoken in Siberia, like Polish rojony ja or Czech narozena sem 'I was born' etc.); 3) possessive constructions of Russian 'to be' type, also without copula in the present tense, widespread in all the immigrant dialects under examination, along with original 'to have' type constructions (cf. Czech mn 'eli vosum defeat ... i u fsexn'ex soD ted' det'i 'they had eight girls, and all of them have their own children now'); 4) other non-copulative sentences coexisting with copulative (verbal) phrases used even if calquing the Russian purely nominal pattern (cf. Polish ja na p''ens'ii jus tera / ja jus jest na p''ens'ii 'I am already retired now'). It is stated that the speakers of the examined dialects permanently oscillate in their discourse between originally West Slavic sentence structures and their correspondences in Russian. Such a situation leads to the origin of a mixed code which is fully understandable only within the insular community where it is used. As with the expansion of modern urban civilization all of the dialects in question have not been naturally transmitted across generations and at the present time they are gradually disappearing, it is no doubt that very soon we will be able to trace in each case at most single marks of this code in the totally Russian speech of the descendants of former immigrants.

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