Diskursivnye elementy v russkoj reči ital’jancev: nekotorye zakonomernosti usvoenija

[Discourse markers in the Russian speech of Italians: some regularities of acquisition] To study the usage and the acquisition of discourse elements in Russian L2 by Italian students, an oral educational corpus was assembled – a replica of the experiment presented on the website www.spokencorpora.ru with which our data were compared. It was shown that, unlike logical connectives, for which there seems to be no order of acquisition, for discourse elements, this order is obviously present, correlating with the year of study and the level of language proficiency. This difference confirms that the acquisition of discourse elements, in contrast to the logic connectives occurs spontaneously even in classroom teaching. Moreover, the order of acquisition of discourse elements in Russian L2 was compared with Italian L2 data in terms of functional types and this revealed a strong match.