Russian epicenes are a fascinating class of words, which is continuously enriched with new formations. Nouns of common gender tend to be stylistically marked as colloquial or sub-standard, are typically used in less formal registers and are endowed with strong connotations towards the referent. This paper reports the findings of a survey conducted in order to investigate the patterns of agreement of epicene nouns in contemporary Russian. Results show that in structuring a sentence within a certain stretch of discourse, Russian associates a discourse-relevant entity with a choice of agreement that signals this relevance in discourse. Strategies aimed at signalling the information structuring of discourse play a substantial and hitherto ignored role in the agreement of epicenes, with formal, morphological agreement marked with respect to semantic agreement.

RUSSIAN EPICENE NOUNS: MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND SYNTACTIC BEHAVIOUR

BOCALE, PAOLA
2015-01-01

Abstract

Russian epicenes are a fascinating class of words, which is continuously enriched with new formations. Nouns of common gender tend to be stylistically marked as colloquial or sub-standard, are typically used in less formal registers and are endowed with strong connotations towards the referent. This paper reports the findings of a survey conducted in order to investigate the patterns of agreement of epicene nouns in contemporary Russian. Results show that in structuring a sentence within a certain stretch of discourse, Russian associates a discourse-relevant entity with a choice of agreement that signals this relevance in discourse. Strategies aimed at signalling the information structuring of discourse play a substantial and hitherto ignored role in the agreement of epicenes, with formal, morphological agreement marked with respect to semantic agreement.
2015
978-5-94755-375-8
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11383/2062714
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