The use of original case forms of nouns in the speech of Chinese students learning Russian as a foreign language (against the background of the natural way of language learning)

The object of the study is the psycholinguistic factors of using the base forms of nouns in the Russian speech of Chinese language speakers. For the first time, an analysis is undertaken of the functioning of the nominative singular forms in various grammatical meanings in the speech of Chinese language speakers against the background of similar errors made by monolingual Russian-speaking children in the early stages of ontogenesis. The author proposes a formal classification of the substitution of forms of various cases for the nominative case, examines the persistence of such violations depending on whether the case form performs structural and semantic functions, analyzes the dependence of erroneous choices on the grammatical meaning of the form, and discusses types of object and subject meanings in which the base forms appear in the speech of Chinese language speakers and Russian-speaking children. The material is extracted through a random sampling method from written assignments of students at the China University of Petroleum (Qingdao) and St. Petersburg University, as well as from the "Russian Language Corpus of HSE RLC" (144 forms). The analysis employs descriptive, comparative, and error analysis methods. It concludes that in the written speech of Chinese students, forms that coincide with the base ones are used instead of forms of all cases, including in prepositional-case constructions. Some errors are linked to grammatical overgeneralization, manifested in the occasional formation of genitive plural forms and accusative singular and plural forms of animate and inanimate nouns. A significant contribution is considered to be the identification of error causes common to children and non-native speakers: difficulties in mastering the structural meanings of grammatical forms in quantitative-nominal and negative constructions, and the gradual development in the interlanguage of the individual of ways to express various shades of subjective (subject of state, joint action, or possession) and objective meanings (object-debilitative, mediative, etc.). The novelty of the research lies in identifying the mechanisms of simplification of the grammatical system of the foreign language being acquired, which involves simplified structuring of constructions with the meanings of cause and purpose, mixing of control forms with synonymous verbs, and indistinction of locative and directive meanings. The results obtained can be used to refine the understanding of strategies for mastering both native and foreign languages, as well as in developing teaching methodologies for the Russian language for Chinese language speakers.

grammatical supergeneralization, frozen form, interlingual interference, language acquisition, ontolinguistics, speech errors, Russian as a foreign language, case value, prepositional-case construction, simplification