Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Russian feminitives: what can corpus data tell us?

  • Published:
Russian Linguistics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Recent years have seen considerable debate concerning Russian feminitives, i.e. derived formations that designate female professionals, such as advokatka, advokatša, advokatessa, ženščina-advokat or advokat-ženščina that all refer to female lawyers. In this article, we investigate the use of feminitives based on data from the Araneum Russicum Maximum corpus and the Russian National Corpus. It is shown that the choice of feminitive to some extent depends on the morphophonological properties of the base word. It is furthermore argued that suffixed feminitives are more frequent than compounds like ženščina-advokat and advokat-ženščina, and that the distribution has changed over time. Suffixed feminitives reveal a stronger tendency to combine with gender-related epithets (e.g., obajatel’naja agentka ‘charming agent’), while the type ženščina-X is frequently used with the epithet pervyj ‘first’. Our article is an empirical study of the actual use of feminitives in corpus data, which we hope will inform future metalinguistic discussion and prescriptivist thinking about feminitives in Russian.

Аннотация

В последние годы ведется активная дискуссия о русских феминитивах, т. е. о производных единицах, обозначающих женщин по роду занятий, например адвокатка, адвокатша, адокатесса, женщина-адвокат и адвокат-женщина для указания на женщину, которая занимается адвокатской деятельностью. В этой статье использование феминитивов изучается на основе данных корпуса Araneum Russicum Maximum и Национального корпуса русского языка. Мы показываем, что выбор феминитива в определённой степени зависит от морфонологических свойств производящей основы. Кроме того, мы демонстрируем, что суффиксальные феминитивы имеют более высокую частотность, чем композиты типа женщина-адвокат и адвокат-женщина, и что их распределение со временем меняется. Суффиксальные феминитивы склонны сочетаться с определениями, так или иначе связанными с гендером (напр., обаятельная агентка), в то время как тип женщина-X часто используется со словом первая. Наша статья представляет собой эмпирическое исследование феминитивов в корпусах, и можно надеяться, что полученные выводы будут полезны для дальнейших металингвистических дискуссий и для формулирования прескриптивных указаний.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Throughout the article, we refer to feminitive formation patterns as they include both suffixation and compounding. Formations as ženščina-X are sometimes analyzed as appositive constructions, but their exact status is beyond the scope of our study.

  2. The Araneum Russicum Maximum is available at http://unesco.uniba.sk. The Russian National Corpus can be accessed at www.ruscorpora.ru.

  3. Masculine nouns corresponding to some of these nouns can also be formed, e.g. akušer, vyšival’ščik, etc., but they are not listed in the All-Russian Classification.

  4. We emphasize that this is a sample of bases rather than a sample of suffixed units as in (Bobkova & Montermini, 2020).

  5. More accurately, one should distinguish between the suffix proper and the inflectional ending linked to this suffix, e.g. -k-a. However, for the sake of brevity we will use the notation -ka, etc. throughout this paper.

  6. Other less frequent and non-neutral compounds such as devuška-direktor ‘young.woman-director’, staruška-direktor ‘old.woman-director’, etc. were not included. This also applies to rare suffixes like -essa as in poètessa ‘female poet’ and advokatessa ‘female lawyer’ and -isa as in direktrisa ‘female director’, although we will return to advokatessa in Sect. 3 below. We also do not consider suffixes that have more specific meanings like -ička ‘female teacher of a certain subject’, as in geografička ‘female geography teacher’, biologička ‘female biology teacher’, etc.

  7. Thus, a combination -tel’ + -nica is a morphologically complex affix consisting of a dependent and its carrier as defined by Stump (2020).

  8. The analysis was performed in R using rpart package (R Core Team, 2021; https://rdocumentation.org/packages/rpart/versions/4.1-15).

  9. Note that kočegarka ‘steamshop’ was filtered out manually at the preceding stages of analysis.

  10. Seven examples in our database involve both compounding and suffixation at the same time. For instance, in babuška-inženerša ‘(lit.) grandmother-female engineer’ both the compounding of babuška and inžener and the addition of the suffix -ša is used to clarify the gender of the referent. In Table 2 and Fig. 2, these examples are counted as suffixed models.

  11. Notice that we have only investigated preposed agreement targets.

  12. Unless otherwise indicated, numbered examples are from the RNC. For each example a year is given in addition to the name of the author (for fiction) or the periodical (for non-fiction).

  13. Our database does not contain examples with relevant agreement patterns; this example is from the internet: https://glosbe.com/en/ru/criminal%20lawyer.

  14. We would like to emphasize that we do not make any claims about productivity of the suffixes under scrutiny. Our sample of ten words from the RNC is too small to facilitate claims about productivity, and we focus on high frequency lexemes that are not well suited for an investigation of productivity.

  15. Strictly speaking, examples like (5) are not “feminitives” since they denote a wife of a professional rather than a female professional. We have included examples like (5) in our database, since this enables us to investigate empirically the semantic shift from ‘wife’ to ‘female professional’.

  16. CoCoCo is available at https://cococo.cosyco.ru.

References

  • Arndt-Lappe, S. (2014). Analogy in suffix rivalry: The case of English -ity and -ness. English Language and Linguistics, 18, 497–548.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arkhangelskaya, T. A. (2014). Simmetrija i asimmetrija grammatičeskoj kategorii roda i semantičeskoj kategorii pola v slavjanskix jazykax. PhD dissertation, Olomouc.

    Google Scholar 

  • Badanina, I. V. (2017). Funkcionirovanie feminativov v jazyke interneta. In A. V. Dolžnikova & V. V. Barabaš (Eds.), Russkij jazyk v internete: ličnost’, obščestvo, kommunikacija, kul’tura: sbornik statej i mežduna­rodnoj naučno­praktičeskoj konferencii, Moscow: Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beliaeva, N., & Knoblock, N. (2019). Conceptual blending in the construction of morphological blends. In Paper presented at the international cognitive linguistics conference (ICLC-15), Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan, August 6–11, 2019.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benko, V. (2014). Aranea: Yet Another Family of (Comparable) Web Corpora. In P. Sojka, A. Horák, I. Kopeček, & K. Pala (Eds.), Text Speech and Dialogue (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8655) (pp. 257–264). Proceedings of 17th International Conference, TSD 2014, Brno, Czech Republic, September 8–12, 2014. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bobkova, N., & Montermini, F. (2020). Suffix rivalry in Russian: What low frequency words tell us. In J. Audring, N. Koutsoukos, & C. Manouilidou (Eds.), Mediterranean Morphology Meeting 12 Online Proceedings. https://pasithee.library.upatras.gr/mmm/article/view/3245.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bobylëva, M. (2021). My tak govorim. Obidnye slova i kak ix izbežat’. Moscow: AST.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doleschal, U. (2015). Gender marking. In Word-formation: an international handbook of the languages of Europe (pp. 1159–1171).

    Google Scholar 

  • Fufaeva, I. (2018). Tkaxa, blogerša i novaja glava goroda. Počemu feminitivy byli, est’ i budut ograničennoj čast’ju russkogo jazyka. Nož, December 27, 2018. https://knife.media/word-formation-difficulties/.

  • Fufaeva, I. (2020). Kak nazyvajutsja žensčiny. Feminitivy: istorija, ustrojstvo, konkurencija. Moscow: Korpus.

    Google Scholar 

  • Georgievskaja, E. N. (2018). Komu ugrožajut feminitivy? Russian feminist association ONA, February 8, 2018. https://ona.org.ru/post/170655867278/linguistic-menace.

  • Kirey-Sitnikova, Y. (2021). Prospects and challenges of gender neutralization in Russian. Russian Linguistics, 45, 143–158. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-021-09241-6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kopotev, M., Escoter, L., Kormacheva, D., Pierce, M., Pivovarova, L., & Yangarber, R. (2015). CoCoCo: online extraction of Russian multiword expressions. In The 5th workshop on balto-slavic natural language processing, 10–11 September 2015, Hissar, Bulgaria. Sofia: INCOMA Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krongauz, M., & Severin, A. (2019). Feminitivy ukorenjatsja, esli izmenitsja sama žizn’. Kul’tura, March 1, 2019. https://portal-kultura.ru/articles/kulturnaya-politika/236355-maksim-krongauz-feminitivy-ukorenyatsya-esli-izmenitsya-sama-nasha-zhizn/.

  • Lindsay, M., & Aronoff, M. (2013). Natural selection in self-organizing morphological systems. In F. Montermini, G. Boyé, & J. Tseng (Eds.), Morphology in Toulouse: Selected Proceedings of Décembrettes 7 (pp. 133–153). Munich: Lincom Europa.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lopatin, V. V., & Uluxanov, I. S. (2016). Slovar’ slovoobrazovatel’nyx affiksov sovremennogo russkogo jazyka. Moscow: Azbukovnik.

    Google Scholar 

  • Magomedova, V. D., & Slioussar, N. A. (2021). Gender and case in Russian nouns denoting professions and social roles. In Computational linguistics and intellectual technologies: proceedings of the international conference “Dialogue 2021”, Moscow, June 16–19, 2021.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morozova, K. (2018). Slovo avtorka protivoestestvenno: filologi o tom, počemu feminitivy vsex besjat. Sobaka.ru, April 12, 2018. https://www.sobaka.ru/city/science/71329.

  • Mozdzierz, B. M. (1999). The rule of feminization in Russian. In M. Mills (Ed.), Slavic gender linguistics (pp. 165–182). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Naccarato, C. (2019). Agentive (para)synthetic compounds in Russian: A quantitative study of rival constructions. Morphology, 29, 1–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nesset, T., & Janda, L. A. (2010). Paradigm structure: evidence from Russian suffix shift. Cognitive Linguistics, 21(4), 699–725.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Piperski, A. Ch. (2018). Juristka i juristec: Lingvist o buduščem feminitivov i izmenenijax v jazyke. Wonderzine, March 29, 2018. http://www.wonderzine.com/wonderzine/life/life-interview/234057-alexander-piperski.

  • Piperski, A. Ch. (2019). Kovarnye suffiksy. Kak sovremennye feminitivy menjajut russkij jazyk. https://nplus1.ru/material/2019/11/28/russian-feminitives.

  • R Core Team (2021). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.

  • Rozental’, D. È., Džandžakova, E. V., & Kabanova, N. P. (1998). Spravočnik po russkomu jazyku. Moscow: CheRo.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simpson, E. H. (1949). Measurement of diversity. Nature, 163, 688.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stump, G. (2020). The morphotactics of dependent affixes. Preprint available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341829444_The_morphotactics_of_dependent_affixes.

    Google Scholar 

  • Švedova, N. Ju. et al. (Eds.) (1980). Russkaja grammatika (Vol. I). Moscow: Akademija nauk SSSR.

    Google Scholar 

  • Townsend, C. E. (1968). Russian word-formation. New York: McGraw-Hill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Uhlik, M. (2019). Izražanje spolske korelacije pri položajnih poimenovanjih v ruščini in slovenščini. Slavisticna revija, 67(2), 313–324.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Tore Nesset & Svetlana Sokolova

  2. Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia

    Alexander Piperski

  3. HSE University, Moscow, Russia

    Alexander Piperski

Authors
  1. Tore Nesset
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Alexander Piperski
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Svetlana Sokolova
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander Piperski.

Ethics declarations

Statement about conflict of interest

We are not aware of any conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Nesset, T., Piperski, A. & Sokolova, S. Russian feminitives: what can corpus data tell us?. Russ Linguist 46, 95–113 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-022-09253-w

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-022-09253-w

Keywords

Search

Navigation