Denoting female professionals: semantic and grammatical gender agreement with hybrid nouns in Russian

Abstract

This thesis investigates semantic feminine and grammatical masculine gender agreement in Russian, focusing on hybrid nouns associated with professional titles referring to females. Applying both corpus and experiment approaches, this research explores gender agreement in noun-verb (N-V) and adjective-noun constructions (A-N), as well as understudied mixed agreement adjective-noun-verb (A-N-V). Further, this work investigates factors that can potentially influence the type of agreement such as the duration of exposure of the hybrid noun to the language (old-new noun factor) and the presence of a feminitive counterpart of a hybrid noun. Another factor that has been explored is whether the type of adjective (i.e. qualitative or relational) affects the type of agreement in A-N structures. The key findings confirm The Agreement Hierarchy by Corbett, that provided the theoretical frame for the present study, illustrating that semantic feminine agreement is more likely in N-V than in A-N structures. Furthermore, Russian native speakers demonstrated a robust ability to differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical mixed agreement structures. Although the corpus data suggested that older professional nouns more frequently take semantic (feminine) agreement than grammatical (masculine) agreement, experimental results showed no statistically significant difference. Additionally, the presence of feminine counterparts did not significantly affect the type of agreement, calling for further research with different experimental designs. The research also revealed that the type of adjective plays a substantial role in determining the type of agreement, with relational adjectives tending to take grammatical masculine and qualitative adjectives leaning towards semantic feminine agreement.