Prepositional Case in Written and Oral Speech of French-Russian Bilinguals

The article focuses on the peculiarities of the prepositional case: its development and functioning in the speech of French-Russian bilinguals. The main research method is the analysis of errors. The data from the Russian Learner Corpus and the Corpus of the Russian Heritage Language in France, developed by the author of the study, were used as empirical material. It has been established that bilinguals use the following strategies: generalization, simplification, calquing. The work identifies and describes in detail three types of anomalies: inflectional innovations, morphosyntactic errors associated with the choice of preposition; selection errors made as a result of case competition in an individual language system. It is concluded that bilinguals often get stuck on mistakes typical of young children. There is a peculiarity in the construction of their mental grammaticon, which leads to the generation of anomalous structures. The loss of the prepositional case, detected in the speech of bilinguals with dominant English, Finnish and Tajik dominant languages, and its replacement with the genitive case are only partially confirmed in our material. It has been established that a more serious difficulty may be the choice of case inflection in writing, the choice of a preposition, or the encoding of locative relations. The results obtained are significant both for further research into the speech of bilinguals and for the development of didactic materials for this category of native speakers.