Corpus analysis of the violations of gender coordination in the Russian speech of Kazakh students

Abstract

The article is devoted to the description of violations of gender coordination between subject-nouns
and different types of predicates found in Russian texts of Kazakh students. The purpose of the article is
to identify typical deviations and establish the factors that cause them. The source of the material was the
Kazakh subcorpus of the Russian Learner Corpus (www.web-corpora.net/RLC). Examples of coordination
disorders were extracted using the AgrGender tag, which marks various facts of violation of gender
coordination in the corpus, then, in accordance with the tasks set, these examples were classified, selected
and statistically processed. It is argued that violations of gender coordination are not accidental:
they are explained by the complexity of mastering the strategy of coordination in effect in the Russian
language, and the formal nature of the category of grammatical gender. The article describes cases of
violation of coordination of subjects with verb and nominal parts of predicates under the influence of
inanimate nouns, expansion of the strategy of semantic agreement, incorrect choice of the agreement
controller, distant location of subjects and predicates, etc. In general, violations of coordination differ
from violations of agreement in attributive phrases. A corpus analysis of gender coordination disorders
in Russian texts of Kazakh students can be interesting both from the point of bilingualism view research
and from the standpoint of teaching Russian as a non-native language.
Key words: Russian, Russian Learner Corpus, gender coordination, Kazakh-Russian bilingualism,
written text.