The instrumental case in Russian written texts of Kazakh students: evidence from the Russian learner corpus

Abstract

The article examines non-standard examples of the instrumental case with and without prepositions in texts written in Russian by Kazakh students of universities in Almaty. The texts are located in the Russian Learner Corpus (www.web-corpora.net/RLC), and this provides new opportunities for describing and analyzing strategies for their construction. The detected deviations in the use of the instrumental case are explained by the influence of both the case system of the native language and related Russian constructions, as well as the nontrivial decisions of bilingual authors. The article analyzes the most typical examples of the Kazakh subcorpus  of missing preposition in the instrumental case and, conversely, using the instrumental case with an excessive preposition; an attempt to explain the reasons for the detected deviations is presented. The obtained results can be used in the practice of teaching the Russian language and serve as an addition to the research on Kazakh-Russian bilingualism.