The Case of the Accusative Case in Heritage Russian

Nell'ambito del ciclo di seminari SlavLingColl (Slavic Linguistics Colloquia) il 5 febbraio 2026 Natalia Meir (Bar-Ilan University) terrà una conferenza dal titolo "The Case of the Accusative Case in Heritage Russian". 

Link Zoom per partecipare: https://hu-berlin.zoom.us/j/64846185582?pwd=K1kyMGI5WVhjd1ZXNWFJbWc4T0U2Zz09

Abstract: This talk examines the representation and processing of the accusative case in heritage Russian, drawing on evidence from child and adult bilingual speakers of Russian and Hebrew (e.g., Janssen & Meir, 2018; Meir, Avramenko, & Verkhovtceva, 2021). The accusative case provides a particularly revealing testing ground for heritage grammars due to systematic cross-linguistic differences in object marking. Russian employs a structural morphological case system, sensitive to gender and animacy, realized through inflectional suffixes, whereas Hebrew uses differential object marking, expressed by a prenominal particle preceding definite noun phrases. Using a multi-method approach (such as elicited and spontaneous production, grammaticality judgments, eye-tracking, and ERP measures), I show that accusative marking is vulnerable in heritage Russian across modalities and age groups (Janssen & Meir, 2018; Meir et al., 2021; Meir, Parshina, & Sekerina, 2024). The findings reveal asymmetries between underlying morphosyntactic knowledge and surface realization, modulated by animacy, gender, and cross-linguistic influence, displaying patterns that are characteristic of heritage language grammars (Polinsky, 2018). These results are discussed within theoretical accounts of heritage language representation, particularly the Feature Re-Assembly Hypothesis, and contribute to a broader understanding of how core grammatical features are shaped by bilingual experience across the lifespan.

Selected references:

Janssen, B., & Meir, N. (2018). Production, comprehension and repetition of accusative case by monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian–Dutch and Russian–Hebrew children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17021.jan.
Meir, N., Avramenko, M., & Verkhovtceva, T. (2021). Israeli Russian: Case morphology in a bilingual context. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 25(4), 886–907. https://doi.org/10.22363/2687-0088-2021-25-4-886-907.
Meir, N., Parshina, O., & Sekerina, I. (2024). Morphosyntactic cues interact in bilingual sentence processing: An eye-tracking study. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.22102.mei
Polinsky, M. (2018). Heritage languages and their speakers. Cambridge University Press.