Interfered speech of Russian learners of Italian as an example of interlingual interference

Abstract

The paper presents the analysis of interlingual interference from Russian into Italian and considers the most typical mistakes of Russian learners of Italian in different types of oral activities. The study is based on the analysis of oral and written interfered Italian speech of Russian-speaking students. The research methods used in the work are the following: auditory analysis, structural-semantic and comparative-descriptive methods. The findings of the research prove that violations of the language norms occur on all levels of the language system, namely segmental, suprasegmental, grammatical and lexical one. Such violations are caused by structural and typological divergencies between the native (Russian) and the foreign (Italian) languages. On the segmental level, the gravest errors are quantitative and qualitative reduction of vowels, palatalization or shortening of consonants. On the suprasegmental level, the following features were noted: the non-native speakers tended to emphasize the intonational center of the utterance by a sharp pitch increase in the stressed vowel of the most prominent word without making the final pitch rise in the final stressed syllable with the adjacent stressed syllable(s). On the level of grammar, the most significant features identified were the following: article omissions, overuse of articles after link verbs, misuse of the definite/indefinite article, misuse of prepositions, incorrect word order in the sentence, misuse of past tense forms and impersonal verb forms, expressing emphasis via suprasegmental rather than grammatical means, replacement of analytical causative patterns by synthetic verb patterns. The results of the present study can be used in teaching Italian to Russian learners, as well as in developing theoretical courses.