Posle, Cherez, Spustya in Temporal Contexts: Notes on the Writings of Kazakh-Russian Bilinguals

The article concerns the usage of Russian locative prepositions posle, cherez, and temporal preposition spustya in quasi-synonymous temporal contexts (‘after/over’). It is based on the grammatical deviations in the written texts of Kazakh bilinguals presented in the Kazakh sub-corpus of the Russian Learner Corpus (RLC, web-corpora.net/RLC). The RLC has been constructed in Higher School of Economics (School of Linguistics) in collaboration with Kazakh scholars. The deviations represented in the RLC were analyzed against the background of the Russian National Corpus (ruscorpora.ru) representing the prototypical temporal contexts of posle, cherez, and spustya in native Russian. In some cases, corpus methods were also complemented by surveying bilingual speakers. The introductory section includes a general description of the objectives and methods, and tackles with some puzzling examples from the RLC. Then follows a brief survey of the corresponding sets of temporal meanings related to time sequence (the data come from both Russian and Kazakh corpora). The time sequence refers to a situation in the near future occurring after a certain event or timespan, cf.: ‘to come back after the party/after two days’. Two tables summarizing the results for Russian and Kazakh data conclude the first sections and visualize the main differences in the corresponding systems. The RLC texts display the effect of blending that creates a new system of temporal markers’ distribution. The article argues that in most cases the deviations observed in Russian texts produced by bilinguals are triggered by grammatical standards of Kazakh. However, the task of switching from one system to the other is not at all trivial even for bilinguals, and not all cases demonstrate a direct transfer. The usage of cherez raises particular difficulties, especially for isolated (not repeated) situations that have no immediate counterparts in Kazakh, cf.: ‘one day after May 25’ = ‘on May 27’. As it is shown in Section 4, not only Kazakh speakers underuse and misuse this preposition in their texts in Russian, but they reinterpret the standard Russian phrases with this preposition “missing” an extra day (‘on May 26’ instead of ‘May 27’). Variance in their linguistic behavior helps to identify gaps in Russian grammar and makes the RLC an effective tool for a more elaborated semantic explanation of prepositions under description. At the same time, this semantic analy-analysis may serve as a framework for a pilot typological questionnaire and further description of this type of temporal contexts cross-linguistically.

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