COMMON GENDER NOUNS IN RUSSIAN

Abstract

The article will focus on nouns of the “common gender” in the Russian language. For nouns of “common gender”, the grammatical category of gender is mobile and depends on the sex of the person. The first mentions of nouns of the “common gender” in Russian are found in the grammars of the 17th century, which is considered on an equal footing with the masculine, feminine and neuter gender, but is associated with the syntax of the text. The author of the article draws attention to the morphological features of common nouns, which is confirmed by examples from the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The author also highlights the criteria by which words belong to the group of nouns under consideration, including syntactic and morphological features. The article pays attention to borrowed words such as “protegee”, as well as the names of persons who originally correlated with a male person such as “professor”.