CORRELATION OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL IN THE GENDER SHIFT OF THE NOUN

Abstract

The objective of the present article is twofold, first, I intend to illustrate the tendences of expanding the feminine forms of agent-meaning nouns (Mykhaylenko, 2015) in the Ukrainian language due to the split of the masculine or common gender form and, second, I plan to hightlight the models of translation of Ukrainian feminine agent nouns into English. My hypothesis lies in the following: in translating the Ukrainian agentive nouns the change of feminine into masculine occurs and in case of translating English agentive nouns of the masculine (common) gender into Ukrainian the process of ‘domestication occurs that will be proved in the next publication. Corbett(1991)acknowledges that grammatical gender is a multilevel phenomenon – morphological, semantic (overt and covert), and syntactical. It becomes obvious, particularly, in gender assignment to human (agent) nouns, where most nouns referring to women are feminine, and those referring to men are masculine. The definition of agreement itself becomes important but, in the vast literature on gender, there seems to be no unanimous opinion on tis phenomenon and its role in defining the noun gender. Корпусний аналіз висвітлив деякі випадки використання однієї тієї ж номінації в жіночому та чоловічому роді в реченні, наприклад, міністр та міністерка, що свідчить про те, що це явище ще знаходиться в процесі стабілізації.