Feminitives in sports discourse
The features of using feminitives in sports discourse are considered in the article. It has been established that there are nominations for both male and female athletes in the majority of international Olympic sports. The most popular word-formation model for feminitives in sports discourse is the suffix -k(a). These feminitives are stylistically neutral. More than half of them are officially recorded in the explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, others are actively used in the media to designate an athlete by gender. As an alternative, journalists use a feminine noun indicating the nationality of the athlete or a masculine noun together with the name of the athlete to designate a woman. The generalization “women’s team” can be used to denote a group of female athletes. However, to designate mixed gender groups of athletes, both plural forms (masculine and feminine) are used. The reason for it is that the masculine plural is often used precisely to designate the male team in a particular sport.