Abstract

This is a study of Russian nominalizing evaluative suffixes that form nouns of the -a-declension. Such suffixes are very interesting to investigate because they can consistently change the animacy, declension class, and grammatical gender of the base to which they attach. However, the resulting nominalizations belong to different grammatical genders that seem to depend on the biological gender of a discourse referent. This work investigates morphosyntactic properties of such evaluative suffixes and proposes an account for the differences in grammatical gender.Nominalizing evaluative suffixes in Russian are drastically understudied. However, they contribute significantly to many important and much-debated questions in the current linguistic literature concerning the interaction between grammatical gender and declension class, mixed gender agreement, interpretability of gender features, and default gender.This research is done in the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Halle 1997; Marantz 1997, among many others) and contributes to our understanding of the process of nominalization.

Highlights

  • AnimacyThe majority of these suffixes consistently form animate nouns, mostly referring to humans, as in (7), (8) (but they can refer to anthropomorphic animals, such as pets)

  • This is a study of Russian nominalizing evaluative suffixes that form nouns of the -adeclension

  • This work investigates morphosyntactic properties of such evaluative suffixes and proposes an account for the differences in grammatical gender in the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, Halle 1997, Marantz 1997, among many others), which provides us with formal tools for handling syntactic processes that happen inside a word — in this case, inside evaluative nominalizations

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Summary

Animacy

The majority of these suffixes consistently form animate nouns, mostly referring to humans, as in (7), (8) (but they can refer to anthropomorphic animals, such as pets). 20 Poljarnyj vestnik 20, 2017 vulgar suffixes (–ob, –ot) can only attach to inanimate bases and form inanimate nouns, as in (9), (10). Kras-ot-ul-ja pretty-NOM-NOM.SG (FEM; CL II) pretty/red-NOM-EVAL-NOM.SG (MASC/FEM; CLASS II) (8) a. kras-ot-a b. kras-ot-ul-ja pretty-NOM-NOM.SG (FEM; CL II) pretty/red-NOM-EVAL-NOM.SG (MASC/FEM; CLASS II)

Animate suffixes
Summary
Analysis
The place of syntactic attachment
Proposal 2
Proposal 3
Syntactic approaches to account for evaluative derivations
An interpretable gender features approach
Where does referential gender come from?
An analysis of Russian animate derivations
An analysis of Russian inanimate derivations
How can we account for mixed gender agreement?
Conclusions
Full Text
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