GENDER-BASED WORD DERIVATION: FEMININE VARIATIONS OF OCCUPATION TITLES AS SEEN BY MGIMO STUDENTS (EXPERIMENTAL STUDY)

Abstract

The article represents the results of an experimental study conducted in the autumn of 2018 in Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University), which embraced 107 undergraduate and master degree students, studying German as the main foreign language. The study was aimed to bring out conservative and inventive trends in forming feminine gender markings (“feminatives”). An additional aim was to prove the anticipation that the morphological norms of the studied language (German) and foreign language cultural norms can transfer themselves onto the language of a student who is a Russian native speaker. For the study the method of a two-stage survey was chosen, the results of which were further processed utilizing IBM SPSS statistical software package. In the first stage the surveyed students were asked to build a feminine form for 60 denominations of professions or occupations given in a masculine form; in the second stage the surveyed were offered the list of variants to appraise through the prism of the language norm. The results obtained show that the forms belonging to the grammatical norm of the Russian language were statistically dominant. The anticipation that the norms of a studied language (German) can interfere with the speech culture of Russian native speakers was proven only partially. Occasional creative forms found in the survey replies reflect the balance existing between conservative and inventive linguistic trends.