Gender Category of Nouns in the Aspect of Personification

This work pays attention to the category of gender of the nouns in the aspect of personification. In the theoretical part, we figured out a number of definitions that are important to us, including the definition of category, gender, prototype, and the so-called personified metaphor. Based on the theory of conceptual metaphor developed by J. Lakoff and M. Johnson, the study was conducted from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Moreover, personified metaphor is one of the typical types of noumenal metaphor. In other words, there are certain matching relationships between resource domains (person) and target domains (personified objects). The purpose of this work is to elucidate the cognitive basis of personified metaphor with respect to the generic difference in nouns. So, in the analytical part of this work, we were able to summarize the male prototype and the female prototype in the subconscious of native speakers of the Russian language by analyzing all non-human entities used in the personified metaphor in Krylov’s Fables. Next, we examined the difference between the Russian and Chinese people in relation to the generic difference in nouns in the aspect of personification by means of comparative analysis of the images of typical animals in classical literary works. Our focus is on the fox and the wolf.