| Summary: | Russian case forms used by Finns of Russian-speaking descent (englanti)2/2004 (108)Russian case forms used by Finns of Russian-speaking descentThe article examines the influence of Finnish contact on the Russian language by focusing on the following structures: genitive of clausal subject and object, genitive as an object of the prepositional phrase, and dynamic adverbials. The data were extracted from interviews with speakers of Russian who were born or have lived most of their lives in Finland. In addition to Russian, the informants all speak (at least) Finnish. The study data consisted of two corpora: a dialect corpus and an urban corpus. In the dialect corpus, the subjects are descendants of Russian peasants transported to the Karelian Isthmus from the area of Northern Russian dialects in the first half of the eighteenth century. Their variety of Russian has thus developed from a Northern Russian dialect that has subsequently been in contact with the standard Russian of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and with Finnish. In the urban corpus, the subjects are from families who were already living in Finland in the nineteenth century or who came to Finland as immigrants between 1917 and the early 1920s. Their varieties of Russian are orientated towards standard Russian and were last influenced by it in the early twentieth century. The speakers in both corpora have access to contemporary Russian.The Russian genitive and the Finnish partitive of subject and object used to overlap. Throughout the history of Russian, the genitive of subject and object has been displaced by other grammatical means. As a result, the overlap with the Finnish partitive has narrowed through time. The study subjects who habitually speak Russian have retained the genitive of the object in the form it was at the beginning of the 1900s. The dialect speakers systematically use the genitive of the divisible subject in existential clauses. In these changes, the corresponding Finnish partitive has had at least a conservative effect. ...
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