Common Gender'' and Russian noun gender semantics: bi-gender or non-gender?
In modern Russian gender is a functional-semantic category with a wide range of diverse content and multi-level means of expression. The content level (gender semantics) of this category comprises various parameters, among which the opposition 'gender' vs. 'non-gender' is basic. Non-gender is widely spread in animate nouns' domain, within which there are nouns traditionally attributed to the common gender. At the system level gender is marked by the presence of a weak or a strong gender seme in the lexical meaning proper. At the denotative speech plane gender may be represented implicitly (as situation knowledge) or explicated by a variety of forms including uncoordinated forms of adjectival attributes and predicates. Grammatical semantics (morphological gender) of nouns is available in a lexeme irrespective of denotative speech semantics modulations. The ability to denote beings of a definite sex is not the morphological characteristics of the word form and the lexeme as a set of word forms. This ability belongs to the context-denotative plane of semantics with the word forms and to the lexical one with the lexemes, if the masculine or the feminine is part of the word meaning (e.g. мадам, 'madam'). The morphological noun gender (дубина (dubina, 'bat') - f., пень (pen, 'stub') - m., чудовище (chudovishche, 'monster') - n.) does not depend on the context-denotative meaning of sex. True is the inverse statement. In the phrases like врач пришла (vrachprishla, 'the doctor came'), наша врач (nasha vrach, 'our doctor'), кенгуру кормила детеныша (kenguru kormila detyonysha, 'the kangaroo was feeding its young'), etc. nouns of the masculine gender denoting female beings do not become nouns of the feminine gender. Without a context they do not become nouns of the common gender. The gender of verbs (in the past tense) and adjectives is determined by the context-denotative meaning component implied by the author. For this reason nouns of the so-called common gender (егоза (yegoza, 'fidget'), соня (sonya, 'sleepy'), плакса (plaksa, 'crybaby'), сирота (sirota, 'orphan')) discover their true morphological gender in neutral contexts. The noun 'orphan' is of feminine gender, because the context Миша -такой сирота (Misha - takoy sirota, 'Misha is such an orphan') is possible, but the context Маша -такой сирота (Masha takoy sirota, 'Masha is such an orphan') is impossible as the strong grammatical meaning component of the feminine gender prevents sense agreement. The same holds good for the nouns особа (osoba, 'person'), дрянь (drian, 'rubbish'). The noun коллега (kollega, 'colleague') is of masculine gender as you cannot say Ваня - моя коллега (Vanya - moya kollega, 'Vanya is a colleague of mine'). Traditional classification of such nouns as nouns of the common gender does not agree with the morphological essence of the gender category because according to this essence gender is not a word changeable category. Supporters of the common gender conception would consider that егоза (m.) and егоза (f.) are different lexemes which contradicts commonsense (ordinary metalanguage) and scientific sense.