Production of additive connectives by L2 speakers: The i–and-a challenge in Russian

The Russian additive connectives и ‘and’ and a ‘and/but’ have subtle, but crucial semantic-pragmatic differences. This paper investigates production of и and a by Dutch-speaking adults learning Russian as a second language in an instructed setting. The results demonstrate that adult L2 learners have much difficulty acquiring the semantic-pragmatic profiles of и and a. They largely overuse и (and underuse a) in contexts of topic shift, but they also inappropriately use a in reference-shift contexts with an obvious causal link between clauses. The errors they make are partly similar to and partly different from errors earlier attested in the speech of bilingual Dutch-Russian children acquiring Russian in a Dutch-dominant environment. Implications of these similarities and differences are discussed in the light of theories of cross-linguistic influence and implicit vs. explicit language learning.