Ital’janizmy v russkoj reči milanskich èritažnikov ot 4 do 12 let: korpusnoe issledovanie [Italianisms in the Russian Speech of Milanese Hereditary Speakers of Russian Aged from 4 to 12: A Corpus study]

The paper reports the results of a preliminary piece of research conducted in the spring of 2018 in two Russian schools in Milan. The research resulted in the compiling of a corpus of oral descriptions (narratives) of two sets of pictures by children in three age groups: 4–6 years of age, 7–9 years of age and 10–12 years of age, with 25 children in each group. All children are hereditary native speakers of Russian with Italian being their dominant language. The collected audio data have been analysed in view of the following research questions: the infl uence of the dominant language on the speech behavior of the children; the development of the Russian language in their speech habits, regularities in the use of Italianisms in terms of both their quantity in communicative exchanges and in terms of the level(s) of language which require the compensatory uses of the dominant language. The paper discusses the diffi culties that the children participating in the fi eld research experience in relation to the correct choice or use of case forms, peculiarities of stress patterns, the gender assignment of nouns, the problems of refl exive pronouns and lexical collocability. Under review are also the specifi cs of intonation contours and the choice of a communicatively informed structure of the utterance.