Lexicon and Context in Feminization in Russian

Abstract

Many nouns in Russian identify people in terms of membership in groups, defined by activity, role, beliefs, attributes, or origins. Many of these nouns are derived with native Russian suffixes (учи-тель, добровол-ец, сторон-ник, гардероб-щик, прыг-ун); the occasional noun is unsuffixed (врач). Some nouns identifying group membership are borrowings, with or without an etymological suffix in the source language (диктор, корректор, педагог, президент). Most of these masculine nouns of the first declension can form corresponding feminine derivatives of the second declension by adding a suffix, either a modified or expanded form of the masculine suffix, for example -ник/-ница (сторон-ник/сторон-ница), -щик/-щица (гардероб-щик/ гардероб-щица), -ун/-унья (бегун/бегунья) or an additional suffix, -иха (врач/врач-иха), -ша (редактор/редактор-ша), -ка (солист/солист-ка). As is well-known, there is an asymmetry in the usage of these first-declension nouns and their second-declension correlates. The second-declension nouns can refer only to women, but the first-declension nouns can be used in reference to women as well as to men. As a consequence, a man can only be named with a masculine noun, but a woman can in principle be identified by either kind of noun: as врач or врачиха ,a sруководитель or руководительница ,a sписатель or писательница ,a sсторонник or сторонница. It is then natural to ask how, in referring to a woman, speakers make the choice between the correlative masculine and feminine nouns. The modest literature treating these correlative noun pairs has emphasized the social status of women in various occupations and the stylistic properties of the feminine noun. R. Rothstein (1973), observing that “the relative liberation of women in 1917 produced a need for new terminology to refer to women occupying certain jobs or professions”, analyzed the changes in language that came in the wake of this social upheaval by appealing to the markedness of gender: nouns of the masculine gender, unmarked with respect to the feminine, can be used broadly to refer to women. 1 Krysin (Крысин 1974, 277‐296) differentiated lexical items according to the stylistic value of the feminine derivative and constructed two tests that were submitted to approximately three thousand speakers for self-reporting. In one test, speakers were given a list