Gender Assignment of Russian Indeclinable Nouns
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Date
2014-09-29
Authors
Wang, Qiang
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This thesis analyzes the grammatical gender assignment of Russian indeclinable nouns. Chapter I focuses on gender and agreement in Russian nouns. Previous assignment models failed to account for the non-neuter gender of a number of indeclinable nouns. Chapter II proposes a gender assignment mechanism of indeclinable nouns, including an Absolute Semantic Criterion, a Morphosemantic Criterion Based on Hypernyms and Synonyms and a Neuter Filter. Chapter III deals with the methodology of the experiment involving ten native speakers on gender assignment of indeclinable nouns. In the experiment subjects were given sentence tokens in which they were required to select gender agreement morphemes corresponding to their perception of the gender of 62 indeclinable nouns, and they were asked to identify the gender of four out-of-context nonce nouns. Chapter IV analyzes the result of the experiment and shows that the gender assignment mechanism accounts for the actual assignment patterns by native speakers.