1. Modeling gender variation in Russian indeclinable nouns : optimality over structuralism, hierarchical MaxEnt, and degrees of idiosyncrasyVarvara Magomedova, Kirill Chuprinko, Natalia Slioussar, 2024, original scientific article Abstract: In this paper, we provide an analysis of the grammatical gender of 131 inanimate
indeclinable Russian nouns based on the data from the General Internet Corpus
of the Russian Language. We demonstrate that most nouns show substantial variation,
being used in two or even in all three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
We identify several factors affecting this, primarily the gender of the semantic analogy
noun and the root-final vowel. We argue that these data can be used to compare
several major morphological frameworks and conclude that some approaches, namely
optimality-theoretic probabilistic ones, are better suited to account for them. We also
compare different models within the chosen set of approaches and show that the hierarchical
Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) models are superior to the classical MaxEnt
models.
Keywords: gender, MaxEnt, indeclinable nouns, gender agreement, gender variation, Russian, corpus data
Published in RUNG: 16.05.2025; Views: 362; Downloads: 5
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4. Gender variation in indeclinable inanimate nouns and gender markedness in modern RussianKirill Chuprinko, Varvara Magomedova, Natalia Slioussar, 2023, original scientific article Abstract: Abstract
In this paper, the results of a large web-corpus study on gender of Russian inanimate indeclinable common nouns are presented. In most cases, neuter is assigned to indeclinables as a default. However, morphophonological and semantic analogy may lead to feminine and masculine gender assignment. An extensive variation is observed in the whole group of indeclinables and for particular words, which is much larger than anything that can be found in indeclinable nouns. These data support the idea that both masculine and neuter genders have a special status in the Russian gender system (Magomedova & Slioussar 2023). Masculine tends to be chosen in case of conflicting gender cues. When there are no strong cues pointing to any gender, neuter is assigned as the default option. The results of the study are hardly compatible with various structural approaches to gender assignment, but can be accounted for in competition-based models.
Keywords: grammatical gender, Russian, gender variation, corpus study, linguistics
Published in RUNG: 26.01.2024; Views: 2005; Downloads: 4
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