Heritage speakers (HSs) are known to differ from monolingual speakers in various linguistic domains. The present study focuses on the syntactic properties of monolingual and heritage Russian. Using a corpus of semi-spontaneous spoken and written narratives produced by HSs of Russian residing in the US and Germany, we investigate HSs’ word order patterns and compare them to monolingual speakers of Russian from Saint Petersburg. Our results show that the majority language (ML) of HSs as well as the clause type contribute to observed differences in word order patterns between speaker groups. Specifically, HSs in Germany performed similarly to monolingual speakers of Russian while HSs in the US generally produced more SVO and less OVS orders than the speakers of the latter group. Furthermore, HSs in the US produced more SVO orders than both monolingual speakers and HSs in Germany in embedded clauses, but not in main clauses. The results of the study are discussed with the reference to the differences between main and embedded clauses as well as the differences between the MLs of the HSs.

众所周知，传统使用者 (HS) 在各个语言领域都与单语使用者不同。本研究的重点是单语和传统俄语的句法特性。我们使用居住在美国和德国的俄罗斯人的 HS 制作的半自发口头和书面叙述语料库，研究了 HS 的词序模式，并将其与来自圣彼得堡的单语俄语使用者进行比较。我们的结果表明，HS 的大多数语言 (ML) 以及子句类型导致了说话者群体之间词序模式的观察差异。具体来说，德国的 HS 与俄语单语使用者的表现相似，而美国的 HS 通常比后者产生更多的 SVO 和更少的 OVS 指令。此外，美国的 HS 在嵌入条款中比单语使用者和德国的 HS 产生更多的 SVO 命令，但在主条款中则不然。结合主要条款和嵌入条款之间的差异以及HS的ML之间的差异来讨论研究结果。