Authors

Discussion

Traditionally, research in case acquisition and in teaching of cases, as well as various grammar references, operate two main concepts, namely “case function” (“case meaning” in Janda, 2002), which is understood as a syntactic role executed by certain case inflection; and “case form”, which can be described as a nominal (or adjectival) stem inflected for case (e.g., Malchukov & Spencer, 2009; Wade, 2011). The present paper, based on extensive investigations within a longitudinal teaching intervention, offers a new, more nuanced concept of “case context”, which appears to have a considerable effect on the accuracy of the oral production of case forms in L2 beginner learners’ speech, and might change the way we view, teach and investigate case accuracy.

Unlike “case functions”, which are syntactic, “case contexts” are pragmatic and are connected to lexical meanings of the inflected lexis. For example, Russian Prep. case, as well as having the main function of “a place”, is used for some time references, transport, events and musical instruments (after the verb “to play”), among other contexts. Beginner participants in the present experiment produced different case inflection success rates for different case contexts for the same case, indicating differences (often significant) in cognitive processing of the same inflection.

This paper will present some statistical data demonstrating the differences in accuracy between case contexts within two Russian cases, namely Prepositional and Accusative, and discuss possible causes for these. These results have important implications for teaching Russian cases and for measuring case accuracy in Instructional SLA.