Professions and gender agreement in Russian
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2021/12/0023/000496Keywords:
grammatical gender, profession, stereotype, processing, RussianAbstract
In Russian, most nouns denoting professions are historically masculine, but can now be used as common gender: with both masculine and feminine agreement. At the same time, some of these nouns have paired feminine nouns (e.g. zhurnalist ‘journalistM/(F)’ – zhurnalistka ‘journalistF’). We investigated for the first time how the availability of such pairs influences the processing of common gender nouns with feminine agreement. We found that online (in a self-paced reading task), this factor does not play a significant role, while stereotypicality (which professions are perceived as stereotypically male or female) does. Offline (in an acceptability judgment task), the situation is the opposite.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
