As I said in the previous section, the semantic criteria are only relevant for nouns denoting human beings and certain animals; hence they only cover a relatively small proportion of nouns, while for the majority of nouns in the language there is a strong correlation between gender and inflectional class, i.e. declension. According to Corbett (1991), Russian nouns form four
inflec-tional paradigms,4 and in general their gender is marked morphologically in a fairly regular manner, so that nouns of declensional type I are masculine, nouns of declensional type II and III are feminine, and nouns of declensional type IV are neuter. This distinction is demonstrated in Table 2.1. Note that the words are shown only in singular, as there are no gender distinctions in the plural.
Table 2.1: Declensional classes in Russian
I II III IV
suprug(M) supruga(F) sol0(F) lico(N)
‘husband’ ‘wife’ ‘salt’ ‘face’
SG
NOM suprug-Ø suprug-a sol0-Ø lic-o ACC suprug-a suprug-u sol0-Ø lic-o GEN suprug-a suprug-i sol0-i lic-a DAT suprug-u suprug-e sol0-i lic-u INS suprug-om suprug-oj sol0-ju lic-om LOC suprug-e suprug-e sol0-i lic-e
As pointed out by Corbett (1991), gender assignment crucially depends on the knowledge of declensional classes, i.e. the whole paradigm of inflectional affixes.5 This is to say that gender cannot be simply derived based on one case form. For example in Table 2.1 all four nouns have distinct phonological forms in nominative singular, which is considered to be the basic form of a Russian noun (cf. Corbett 1991:35). Specifically, the masculine nounsuprug
‘husband’ in class I ends in a non-palatalized (hard) consonant and has zero ending (-Ø), its feminine counterpartsupruga ‘wife’ in class II ends in -a, the feminine nounsol0 ‘salt’ in class III ends in a palatalized consonant and has zero ending, and the neuter noun lico ‘face’ in class IV ends in -o. Thus, it might appear that a noun’s phonological form in nominative singular can be sufficient to predict its gender. However, as Corbett notes, there are examples where reference to a single form is not sufficient. Specifically, nouns that end in a palatalized consonant and have zero ending in nominative singular can be either feminine, e.g. sol0 ‘salt’, or masculine, e.g. den0 ‘day’. Nevertheless, the former belong to Declension III and the latter to Declension I. Thus it
4In later work Corbett and Fraser (2000) introduced declensional class V which covers indeclinable nouns likepal0to ‘coat’. These nouns are not considered here, since they fall outside the scope of the morphological assignment rules, which account for gender with the nouns in Table 2.1 and which are considered further in Section 2.5.
5Corbett (1991) argues that gender is not a feature on the stem, since different gender values are represented by different sets of inflectional affixes.
appears that the form of nominative singular for these nouns is ambiguous, hence it is only knowing the whole inflectional paradigm that gender of these nouns can be successfully predicted.6
From an acquisition perspective, phonological information or, to be more specific, the sound shape of the nominative singular is even more ambigu-ous, since many neuter nouns that belong to Declension IV and end in an unstressed -o (a reduced vowel, typically schwa) are undistinguishable from feminine nouns in Declension II that end in an unstressed -a, since both of them are reduced vowels (typically schwas), compare e.g.: m´am[@] ‘mommy’
(feminine) vs. z´erkal[@] ‘mirror’ (neuter)).7
Unlike neuter nouns and nouns ending in palatalized consonants, the phonological form of nominative singular is a reliable gender predictor for the nouns considered in my investigation. These nouns belong to declension I or II and end in -a (stressed or unstressed) or a hard consonant and -Ø in nominative singular.8 This fact is important, since the nouns in my experimental study will be presented to children in the nominative singular form.
With regard to their morphological properties, male kinship terms, male
6Interestingly, according to Zakharova (1973), declensions of feminine and masculine nouns ending in palatalized consonants are acquired by children only toward the end of preschool age, i.e. by 6/7. At the same time Gvozdev (1961) reports that gender errors with these nouns occur in the speech of his son Zhenya up to the age of 7;9. These errors include the attribution of feminine nouns likesol0 ‘salt’ to masculine gender and might be due to child’s orientation to the form of a noun in nominative singular, which, according to Zakharova (1973:283), is “the more firmly acquired” case form than the forms of the oblique cases.
7Gvozdev (1961) reports that stem-stressed neuter nouns remain problematic for his son until late in the preschool years.
8One may notice here that unstressed -a is also ambiguous, since it is identical with the unstressed -o. Hence feminine nouns can be confused with neuter. However, the acquisition evidence suggests that only neuter nouns are confused with feminine but not the other way around. This may be due to fact that the class of neuter nouns (among which there are very frequent words like e.g. moloko ‘milk’) is considerably smaller than the class of feminine or masculine nouns (cf. Corbett 1991:78). The latter represent the majority in the lexicon. Interestingly, there is evidence that in some Russian dialects (to the south-east of Moscow) stem-stressed neuter nouns can take the inflections of the second (“feminine”) declension: e.g. ubirat0 s´enuACC(F) vs. Standard Russian ubirat0 s´enoACC(N)(from Kasatkin 2005:122). This can be an indication that these neuter nouns are becoming feminine. Furthermore, it can be suggested that this language change arises in the child language (the idea that originates to Lightfoot (1979)). Polinsky (in press) also mentions that American Russian heritage speakers whose dominant language is English and whose proficiency level of Russian is rather low develop a two-way gender system as they assimilate stem-stressed neuter nouns to feminine, by analogy with feminine nouns in -a.
names in -a, and double gender nouns belong to declension II, where the majority of feminine nouns are found. This means thatpapa ‘daddy’,Vanya, and plaksa ‘crybaby’ are morphologically equivalent to feminine nouns like mama ‘mommy’. This also means that these nouns should be feminine ac-cording to their morphology, but masculine acac-cording to their semantics (in the case of double gender nouns this holds only when they refer to males).
Clearly, the nouns’ morphological properties do not correlate with their se-mantic properties. A similar conflict is observed for hybrids when they refer to females, and for female names in -ok/-ik. These nouns belong to declension I, hence they should be masculine according to their morphology.9 However, they should be feminine according to the semantics, since these nouns refer to females.
It appears that semantic and morphological criteria make conflicting pre-dictions about the nouns’ gender. This means that the gender information that the child finds in the input is rather ambiguous. Yet, there is another source of information, namely agreement, which various researchers consider to be the determining criterion of gender, since it directly reflects the gender value of the noun (Hockett 1958, Corbett 1991 inter alia; cf. the discussion in Section 2.1). Agreement is considered in detail in the next section, and it turns out to be rather straightforward for male kinship terms, male names in -a, and double gender nouns, but varied and complex for hybrids and female names in -ok/-ik.