Variation in Gender Assignment of Indeclinable Nouns in Russian

Student: Chuprinko Kirill

Educational Programme: Philology (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2021

The paper examines the phenomenon of variability in the choice of the genus of inanimate common nouns of indeclinable nouns of the modern Russian language. The research material is corpus data collected in the General Internet Corpus of Russian subcorpus based on the texts of the users of the Live Journal portal. In the course of the work, the influence on the choice of the gender of such factors as the semantics of the indeclinable noun and its formal properties is confirmed. Also in the course of the work, the effect of the influence of the meaning of an indeclinable noun was noticed: nouns with a more abstract meaning and use in a metaphorical meaning tend to choose a neuter gender, which has so far been tested on a small amount of data. The study also shows a high level of variability in the choice of the gender of non-declining nouns in the speech of one native speaker.

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