The secondary linguistic personality of a migrant in the context of destructive interference

Interference in mastering the language of the titular nation of the host country can negatively affect the adaptation of a migrant to a new community. That is why the study of this phenomenon is of particular interest, and the results of such studies can be used to develop effective strategies and methodological materials to prevent manifestations of language interference. This article aims to consider manifestations of destructive interference at the grammatical and lexical-semantic levels in the English speech of one migrant who is the native speaker of Russian. Video interview with Alexey Pajitnov for Science World Magazine (74 min.) was chosen as the material for this study. Comparative, definition and contextual analyses were used to identify and classify the cases of interference. As a result, firstly, systematic manifestations of grammatical interference were found mainly related to the use of verbs and nouns in forms expressing grammatical categories. These particular instances of interference represent the most significant obstacle to successful communication since they lead to the loss of important semantic elements of the utterance. Secondly, instances of lexical-semantic interference whose sources are differences in the set of meanings of words in Russian and English along with the similarity of forms of words having different meanings were identified, as well as word-per-word translation of some well-known set expressions from Russian into English. Among linguocultural differences, we found the use of categorical and assertive utterances typical for communication in Russian but not typical for communication in English.