Nominations of women by profession in modern Russian (based on survey materials)

INTRODUCTION. The purpose of the study is to determine, based on a questionnaire, the role and adaptive capabilities of women’s nominations by profession and in the modern Russian language.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The research material consists of 50 questionnaires received during a survey of students at Altai State University, as well as literary texts presented in the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The following methods were used: questionnaires; continuous sampling method; word-formation, comparative, quantitative analysis.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. It was revealed that the acceptability of gender neologisms is supported by both the social significance of nominations by profession in the feminine form (symmetry, clear indication of the person's gender) and the facts of natural language development. The unacceptability of using such nominations is based on the healthy conservatism of a significant part of the respondents and the desire to preserve established norms and traditions. A variety of wordformation suffixes used to create feminine forms from masculine professional names was revealed.CONCLUSION. The results of the survey allow us to state that gender nominations of women by profession are a fact of the modern Russian language, requiring close attention and study both in the functional, word-formation, and sociolinguistic aspects.