Left Dislocations in Heritage and Monolingual Russian

Abstract The study investigates the occurrence of left dislocations ( LD s) in a corpus of semi-spontaneous narrations produced by heritage and monolingual speakers of Russian. All speaker groups produced LD s, and LD s mostly occurred in spoken mode. Surprisingly, heritage speakers ( HS s) produced LD s more frequently than monolingual speakers, and more individuals in the HS group used LD s as compared to monolingual speakers. Also unexpectedly, formality was not significant for the distribution of LD s. Further, HS s always accented the LD -referent, frequently accented the LD -pronoun, and did not always place an IP -boundary after the LD -referent. These results confirm previous studies by Zemskaja (1973) and Westbury (2016). Finally, “simple” LD s were referentially both given and new, which is also in accordance with previous reports (Gregory & Michaelis, 2000; Zemskaja, 1973). Thus, the results of our corpus study show that the differences between monolingual speakers and HS s lie in the frequency of use of these structures.