Conditional and concessive constructions with Russian conjunctions jesl’i ‘if’ and xot’a ‘although’ in Hill Mari speech

In Hill Mari speech, there are both native conjunctions (for example, gə̈n’(ə̈) ‘if’, gə̈n’ät ‘although’) and borrowed Russian conjunctions (for example, jesl’i ‘if’, xot’a ‘although’). I examined the structure of conditional and concessive clauses in Hill Mari and compared them with the Russian ones. Structurally, these constructions are similar in Russian and Hill Mari (finite verbs, presence of a conjunction), only the position of the conjunction differs. Based on corpus data, I showed that in the Hill Mari speech, the conjunction jesl’i ‘if’ is used prepositively, as in Russian, and can also be duplicated by the conjunction gə̈n’ (jesl’i… gə̈n’). The conjunction xot’a ‘although’ was not duplicated in my data; it also tends to be used prepositively. I have demonstrated that the choice between the Russian and Hill Mari conjunction depends on the speaker (no correlations with sociolinguistic parameters were found). A tendency towards more frequent use of Russian conjunctions was also noted in comparison to earlier data of other researchers. I assume that the use of Russian conjunctions can be explained by structural congruence between the strategies of conditional clause formation in the recipient language (Hill Mari) and in the donor language (Russian). At the same time, the congruence should be incomplete — duplication of conjunctions is possible, since there is an unoccupied slot at the beginning of the protasis for the Russian conjunction.