Категория рода в русском языке: маркированность, синкретизм и роль поверхностной формыGender in Russian: markedness, syncretism, and the role of surface representation

The dissertation presents a series of studies of gender agreement in modern Russian with a special focus on the role of the surface noun form – the surface similarity and frequency of form patterns. The main idea that I propose in the dissertation is that surface form patterns may influence structural features: both their choice and their processing. I also propose that the diversity of surface forms in Russian masculine nouns is the reason for the special status of the masculine gender in terms of markedness and productivity.The dissertation is based on three studies of gender variation. In the first study, we analyze different structural and phonological factors affecting variation in gender agreement and propose a new approach to the problem of gender markedness in Russian. Namely, neuter is the unmarked gender language-wide, while masculine is the greedy class due to its frequency and diversity. In the second study, we analyze how gender and case are interconnected: why it is only in the nominative that some nouns are acceptable with a feminine agreement. We also look at how their acceptability in other cases is affected by syncretism.It appears that they are especially problematic in locative and the reason for that are the syncretism patterns of inflectional affixes.The third study explores the influence of head syncretism and the dependent noun syncretism on attraction effects in gender agreement processing. Syncretism is crucial for detecting agreement errors in processing, as we have shown in experiments on gender agreement attraction.