Реструктуризація в мезолекті: приклад на основі формальної варіативності інфінітива в українсько-російському «суржику»

Apart from minority languages such as Polish, Bulgarian and some others, the linguistic landscape of modern Ukraine can be characterized as «tricodal»: in addition to the Ukrainian and Russian languages, mixed Ukrainian-Russian speech or «Surzhyk» is widely in use. The latter is the subject of emotional discussion in Ukraine, both among scientists and in the non-scientific, intellectual environment, but much less so among «common people». Scholars working with pre-Labovian and implicit theoretical sociolinguistic (and contact linguistic) models view the distribution of Ukrainian and Russian elements in «Surzhyk» as spontaneous and chaotic. Furthermore, «Surzhyk», together with many who use it, has been widely stigmatized as a post-colonial legacy from the times of Russian and Soviet rule when Russian was the socially and politically dominating language. On the other hand, due to the high degree of structural affinity between Ukrainian and Russian, codemixing of the «Surzhyk» type can be seen as one of many cases in Europe in which contact constellations between autochthone vernaculars and a dominating structurally and genetically related literary language result in mixed or hybrid mesolect speech. A major point of difference between the Ukrainian situation and the situation in West or Central Europe is that there have been two standard languages since the middle of the 19th century, Russian and Ukrainian. The latter, however, only had the chance to freely develop after 1990, with increasing success. However, the question for «Surzhyk» is rather to what extent has this code been stabilized in at least a century of widescale Russian-Ukrainian codemixing. The paper illustrates how the degree of stabilization can be measured with quantitative methods, which can also take account of regional differences. Taking as an example the forms of verb infinitives, a corpus-based quantitative analysis of about 10,000 instances evidences that «Surzhyk» indeed shows a considerable degree of stabilization in the use of competing morphological forms. This stabilization can be best interpreted as an instance of structure building in a mesolect between Ukrainian dialects on the one hand and, on the other hand, Russian and Ukrainian standard languages in competing roles during the recent history of Ukraine. Regional differences in stabilization patterns, partially reflecting old dialectal differences, can also be revealed. As long as both «donor languages» remain present in the society, a certain degree of variability will of course always remain, in «Surzhyk» and in comparable phenomena.