A variety in formation? Morphosyntactic variation in Ukrainian-Russian speech and press.

This paper presents some results of our research on morphosyntactic variation in Ukrainian Russian. We argue that the current sociolinguistic situation in Ukraine, primarily marked by Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism, is influencing the grammatical variation of this NDV in formation. This aspect is particularly important, as the continuous contact of Ukrainian with Russian is one of the factors determining the emergence of morphosyntactic variables in the NDV of Russian in Ukraine. We base our analysis of morphosyntactic variation in U-Russian on empirical data from a corpus of spontaneous Russian speech and a corpus of Russian press of Ukraine. Our findings support the necessity to differentiate U-Russian as a language variety with specific features on all levels. Although phonetic and lexical features are the most salient, it is possible to observe some trends in grammatical variation in this non-dominant variety in formation.