ABSTRACT
Acquisition and maintenance of Russian outside the metropolis has attracted the interest of linguists in the past couple of decades. Heritage Russian spoken in the US has been part of this larger discussion informed by theoretical and experimental approaches to the structural variation in immigrant languages and sociolinguistic factors with an impact on that variation, such as input, timing and order of language acquisition, formal instruction, and others.
Placing my own research in the context of these recent inquiries, I focus on a linguistic phenomenon that has been found to exhibit variation in heritage language production and comprehension, namely, anaphoric pronouns (Ivanova-Sullivan, 2014; Kaltsa, Tsimpli, & Rothman, 2015; Keating, VanPatten, & Jegerski, 2011, among others). My approach is informed by proposals about internally motivated structural changes in heritage grammars in the context of reduced input (Scontras, Fuchs, & Polinsky, 2015). I analyze two examples of linguistic variation with overt anaphoric pronouns in Heritage Russian – their overextension to more contexts and their biased interpretation towards a subject antecedent. I argue that such variation involving structurally less complex and perceptually more salient elements at the syntax-discourse interface reflects a specific type of linguistic ‘default’ employed by speakers of Heritage Russian (and not only). Additionally, findings in other domains, such as gender (Rodina & Westergaard, 2017) and case morphology (Polinsky, 2006), relativization (Polinsky, 2011) as well as word order (Ivanova-Sullivan, 2014) will be brought up as evidence of “default” solutions in Heritage Russian motivated by certain language-universal principles towards reduction of complexity and formal opacity.
My discussion of these phenomena moves away from an ideologically colored analysis of the relations between Russian spoken in the metropolis and Heritage Russian, an approach that validates the normative character of the “standard language” and minimizes the important role of variation in heritage language vitality. My interpretation opens new avenues to explorations of Russian as pluricentric language in the making, taking into consideration the variation in different linguistic domains of Heritage Russian as well as its acquisition in a minority language situation.
