Morphological Markers for the Masculine Gender in Modern Slavic Languages

Abstract

This paper examines the morphological markers revealing the grammatical and semantic markedness of the masculine gender in modern Slavic languages and discusses how these morphological markers have been developed narrowing down to the markers for the human male gender. All modern Slavic languages with six or seven-case declension systems have a masculine singular genitive-accusative syncretism found when the referent is animate. Almost all Slavic masculine genitive plural nouns, except BCSM, are also morphologically marked, and their one-syllable endings are apparently distinguished from the zero endings of their feminine and neuter equivalents. Unlike the East and South Slavic languages, the West Slavic languages have specific means in plural to differentiate masculine animate or masculine human referents from others. The Czech masculine animate accusative and nominative nominal plural endings and verbal past plural endings contain specific morphological markers, and the Polish and Slovak counterparts indicating a human referent are also marked with specific morphemes. West Slavic and Ukrainian also can morphologically mark masculine nouns in the dative singular. Polish and Ukrainian masculine dative singular nouns have an ending different from that of the neuter gender, and Czech and Slovak masculine animate dative singular noun endings are morphologically distinguished from those of the neuter and the masculine inanimate gender. Additionally, Slovak masculine nouns have distinct dative, instrumental, and locative plural endings. Thus the grammatical feature of the masculine gender [+Masculine] is reflected in some distinct morphological markers in Modern Slavic languages. Especially in West Slavic, it gave rise to the morphological markers for the semantic category of male humans, i.e., the virility with the additional semantic features [+Animate] and [+Human]. These Slavic morphological markers for [+Masculine], [+Animate], or [+Human] are closely related to the recognition that the animate objects and human males stand out as the cognitively more significant and marked Figure.