School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemThe Russian language in an Australian environment: a descriptive analysis of English interference in the speech of bilingual Russian migrants( 1973)The purpose of this dissertation is to present a descriptive analysis of English interference phenomena observed in Australian Russian as spoken in the urban communities of Melbourne, Sydney and. Brisbane. The project concentrates on vocabulary and idiom (the level at which the bulk of interference phenomena occurs) but phonological and grammatical aspects are introduced in the analysis of integration processes in Chapter IV. Chapter I contains a survey of previous work on bilingualism, language contact and linguistic interference. The basic concepts pertaining to this type of investigation are discussed and defined. Fieldwork is also described. Material for the study was gathered in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It consists of tape-recorded interviews with individual informants and group conversations on the following topics: daily activities, including work and recreation, and memorable events that had occurred before and after migration to Australia. Forty-six informants were used in the investigation and they represent both adult and childhood bilinguals, and a cross-section of the different backgrounds that characterise the Russian migrant population in Australia. As well as a classification of the informants, Chapter I also contains a brief outline of the history of Russian migration to Australia and a description of Russian community activities and efforts towards Russian language maintenance in Australia. Chapter II is concerned with a discussion of the fundamental causes of interference in Australian Russian speech. Actual contextual examples of interference phenomena are described, classified and as far as possible explained using the author's own observations and the findings of other researchers in this field. The analysis shows that interference in the speech corpus may be correlated with sociocultural, structural and psychological factors and that the situations in which Russian and English are used, as well as the attitudes of the speaker, play an important role in conditioning the extent and nature of interference. Chapter III presents a classification of interference phenomena according to different modes of interference, namely, the transfer of English identities (words and expressions in their entirety of form and meaning); the transfer of English distributions (the semantic extension of Russian words on the model of English and the translation of English expressions); the transfer of English identities and distributions to form bilingual compounds and phrases. The transfer of English identities was found to outnumber other modes of interference in the corpus. Chapter IV describes the integration processes used by the informants to adapt English items to the phonological and morphological systems of Russian. The examples show a clear pattern of sound substitution of Russian phonemes for English ones, a strong tendency to assign the majority of English nouns to the masculine gender, a preference for the productive declension, conjugation and word-formation patterns. A number of words and expressions are classified as socially integrated or adopted into Australian Russian on the basis of their frequency and range of occurrence. Chapter V discusses the few examples of code-switching between English and. Russian that occur in the corpus. The Conclusion contains a recapitulation of the main findings of this project and a brief discussion of what these findings indicate about the changing function of Russian in Australia. The three Appendices contain a description of the informants, sample interviews and extracts from Unification relevant to Chapter I.