Russian evaluative nominalizing suffixes and change in gender
Russian evaluative nominalizing suffixes and change in gender

Summary/Abstract: This is a study of Russian evaluative nominalizing suffixes with the ability to produce a change in syntactic category and category features of the base, such as animacy, declension class, and gender. The majority of these suffixes consistently form animate evaluative derivations of declension class II (–a–declension). However, when it comes to grammatical gender, there appears to be no consistency in gender of evaluative derivations. Th us, non–kinship bases are subject to change in gender and consistently produce evaluative derivations of common gender (masculine or feminine). Kinship bases, in comparison, do not change their gender at all. I propose an analysis of this phenomenon within the framework of Distributed Morphology. Th is work will be of interest to theoretical linguists, language typologists, Russian linguists and educators, as well as anybody interested in grammatical gender.

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