Gender-specific vocabulary: lexicographic tradition and dynamic processes in modern Russian language

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the semantic-pragmatic study of gender-marked vocabulary, in particular, emotional and evaluative nouns of common gender usually considered in grammatical and semantic-stylistic aspects. There is a large group of words in the dictionaries belonging as they do to the common gender. However, numerous cases are not so obvious (dushechka (darling), p’yanitsa (drunkard), glupyshka (silly), skvalyga (rogue), etc.). The meaning of such characteristics of a person is heterogeneous: it includes denotative and connotative (pragmatic) macro-components. Of interest is the correlation between gender and emotional-evaluative meanings. Active processes occur in this emotional and evaluative vocabulary category, resulting in lexemes losing their ability to designate males and females and becoming gender-specific characteristics. Lexicographic, psycholinguistic, and contextual analysis of emotional and evaluative nouns of common gender was conducted. We compared the data of three explanatory dictionaries and identified a lot of lexemes requiring special corpus and/or psycho-linguistic research to establish their gender correlation. The results show that the nouns attributed by most respondents (90 % or more) to a particular gender tend to lose their common gender. However, several words causing the biggest difficulties for the respondents made the survey results not unambiguous. We conducted a corpus study to verify the experimental data, with the results confirming our hypothesis. Among the nouns describing both males and females (the core of this grammatical category), some lexemes that tend to become gender specific and, therefore, to shift to the category of masculine or feminine nouns.