Feminitives in linguistic-cultural consciousness of Russian native and non-native speakers

The relevance of the study is determined by the object of research. Description and explanation of grammatically ambiguous positions of the use of linguistic units, including feminitives, are important tasks in teaching future Russian philologists. The Russian language in most cases does not have feminine forms referring to people by their profession or such forms have specific stylistic coloring. Consequently, the principles of grammatical and /or semantic coordination of such units with other parts of the sentence are not fully formalized. This causes difficulties in communication both for non-native and native Russian language speakers. The aim of this study is to identify and systemically characterize the ways how gender semantics of a person is expressed in the speech of Russian language native and non-native speakers when they use nouns which denote profession, title, or position. The main research method was an ascertaining pedagogical experiment. Its results were assessed with the help of methods of analytical description, component analysis, qualification analysis, and statistical data processing. The material of the study was the text-narrative in Russian which was compiled by N. Sadivova. The characters of the text are men, and they are represented by masculine lexemes. The respondents were asked to transform the text according to assignment where the characters belong to the female gender. The study proved that gender asymmetry in naming professions in Russian causes inconsistencies between the usual and normative variants both in the formation of feminine forms and in their use in context. The study identified productive word-formation models which are common to both native and non-native speakers of Russian and are used to create feminitives as usual innovations. 14 types of agreement between sentence members and nouns referring to female individuals have been identified. They indicate a new understanding of female subjectivity and grammatical means for its expression in Russian. It was determined that the linguistic-cultural consciousness of native Russian speakers and non-Russian speakers demonstrates an obvious tendency to use feminine forms as a marker of gender identity even in cases where the derivative is not normatively justified; linguistic-cognitive strategies for matching sentence members with such nouns are compensatory mechanisms for preserving the gender semantics of a person. The derivatives discursively and pragmatically substitute the lexical and morphological gaps of the Russian language. This indicates not only a new linguistic and cultural motivation for language choice, but the axiological determinants of modern society.