The Grammatical Category of Gender in Russian and the Conceptual and Axiological Row “Masculine - Feminine”: From Ethnosemantics to New Gender Semantics

The grammatical category of gender is associated with the cultural universal “masculine - feminine”. In modern Russian, changes in this relation occur. The aim of the article is to show these changes on the material of Russian nouns and other expressions of persons that describe their occupation and social status. The cultural universal “masculine - feminine” is a conceptual and axiological row, a binary opposition of concepts. It has a biological basis - sexual dimorphism among animals and people. Correlation between the conceptual opposition “masculine - feminine” and the grammatical gender is partial when referring to names of persons, which, in their turn, appears to be another binary privative opposition, where the marked member of opposition is the feminine. Masculine nouns express general semantics, irrespective to gender. Thus, the gender opposition is asymmetric in respect to social differences between men and women. In modern Russian, the opposition tends to become more symmetrical with a consistent use of feminitives. Among young Russian speakers, especially in online communication, there is a trend and even deliberate practice of the consistent use of nouns of feminine gender - feminitives - to name women by indicating their occupation or other social status. This practice has two consequences. On the one hand, it leads to a kind of a parity of nominative means of masculine and feminine genders. On the other hand, it tends to destroy the Russian ethno-linguistic feature - asymmetry of the grammatical category of gender. In the literature on the issues of feminitives, several limitations in the Russian language system that the consistent use of feminitives faces are described: the inertia of the lexical system, stylistic connotations of suffixes with feminine gender meaning, a part of Russian society's rejection of these words, etc. The analysis of feminitives' usage in mass media texts about women who do predominantly “men's” work and difficulties of such work revealed the authors' main strategy. As a rule, authors use nouns of masculine gender in the predicative position (Ya rabotala pozharnym ‘I was a fireman'), in phrases with nouns with a general “female” meaning (zhenshchina-pozharnyy ‘woman-fireman'), or in phrases with proper names (pozharnyy “Grinpisa” Anna Barne ‘Greenpeace fireman Anna Barne').

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