Gender agreement of neuter nouns with formant -ica in the Serbian language speakers

Abstract

This paper explores gender agreement of neuter nouns with formant -ica referring to persons of male sex. We used a two-part questionnaire in the research. The first part aimed to test the usage of two types of gender agreement, while the second one assessed how natural the sentence constructions were after these types of agreement occurred. The questionnaire comprised a list of eighteen neuter nouns with formant -ica divided into three classes. In the first part, participants were tasked to fill in the blanks and complete forty-four sentences, while in the second, they were asked to assess how natural 136 sentences sounded on a Likert scale ranging from 1 to 7. Analyses were based both on participants and stimuli (F1xF2) for each questionnaire part separately and the data was statistically processed in SPSS. The results obtained from 156 monolingual speakers of Serbian show that agreement is significantly more frequent in feminine forms, which is why speakers assess it better. Furthermore, they show that the presence of an additional masculine determiner does not increase the frequency of agreement in masculine forms or conduce to better assessment. The results also highlight the relevance of classifying these noun groups based on the criterion of presence/absence of an alternative morphological reference medium for persons of male sex who possess traits expressed by these nouns.