Androgenicity of language and problems of syntagmatics of the category of gender

Gender is one of the basic dimensions of the social structure of the society. Gender studies try to find out how gender stereotypes are reflected in the language system. If the language is not a natural body but a social construct, it must find a reflection of the social representations of the roles, capacities, responsibilities of men and women. The most radical representatives of genderology expressed the opinion that the language needed to be legislatively liberated from forms and expressions that contain gender discrimination. First of all, such "discriminatory" facts attributed to the normal use of the masculine in a generalized sense. Common gender is an Indo-European category and a natural phenomenon. In a broad sense, the possibility of fluctuations in coordination with respect to one noun is included into the common gender. Words of the common gender are otherwise called "homoforms", "homo-dual gender words", "disjunctions of two genders", "two lexemes" or "two meanings of a vocable", and the content of the group is generally understood univocally. In the Russian language the meaning of a female person is expressed by syntactic means, the significance of which is constantly increasing, because the growth of women's labour increases the number of suffices naming women by profession, but there is a reverse process. A number of linguistic studies note that words like doctor should be classified as a common gender noun, because their syntactic properties are similar to the common gender nouns. Most often such nouns are attributed to the common gender with a mark. Uninflected nouns naming both males and females should be classified as common gender nouns. As for the words of the doctor type, it is logical to attribute them to the masculine gender noun. Uninflected nouns do not convey the meanings of gender, number and case with the help of an inflection unlike most nouns of the synthetic inflected languages. Yet they possess grammatical meanings (otherwise they would not be able to function in communicative acts) and express them syntactically. The main syntactic means of expressing the category of gender of common gender nouns is the form of the predicate expressing the predicative sign. Predicative and attributive connections have different load: attribute combinations are largely formal while predicative ones are semantic for they are not so much consistent with the generic form of the noun, but correlate with the sex of the person the noun denotes (vrach prishla (f) / the doctor came, but khoroshiy vrach (m) / a good doctor). The "inertia" of concord in adjectives generates errors. So, attribute connections express grammatical concord, and predicative links indicate the meaning (biological sex). Plural nouns do not distinguish gender of common gender nouns and have no expression of it. The only way to express the gender of uninflected nouns is syntagmatically. Yet, one cannot say that this way dictated the classification of uninflected nouns into belonging to the masculine, feminine or common genders as syntagmatics is predetermined by the denotative content - the lexical meaning.

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