MASCULІNIZING UKRAINIAN FEMINITIVES IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Abstract
The present paper is aimed to investigate the formation of Ukrainian agentive feminitives andtheways of their rendering into English. The data retrieved from English and Ukrainian mass media is the object of a contrastive anslysis to determine common and disyinctive features of feminitives in the both language. In linguistics there is a classification of languages based on gender (i) languages without a grammatical gender, for instance, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian;(ii)languages with a natural gender (i.e. the biological sex of the referents English, Swedish, Norwegian; and (iii) languages with a grammatical gender, for instance, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian in which nouns are always assigned to a particular grammatical gender whicht influences the declension and conjugation of other parts of speech.
The English gender contrasts are mostly natural, the gender of some words can be defined through their correlation with the singular forms of the 3rd person pronouns: he – male, she – female, and it – inanimate.
Ukrainian nouns have three grammatical genders (agreement classes): masculine, feminine and neuter and has an array of gender markers: personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, nouns, adjectives, verbs, numerals which agree with the noun grammatical gender. An agent noun is a word that identifies a person’s occupation or profession, place of origin or residence, or other association, or a device that performs a task, generally signals its function with a suffix.
Nowadays, in English, gender-specific nouns are often defined as inappropriate. Our waiters and waitresses are now servers, our stewards and stewardesses are now flight attendants, and our policemen and policewomen are now just officers. All the major style guides recommend avoiding gender-biased language.
On the contrary, Ukrainian is marked with the gender assymmetry – a set of feminine forms and their frequency in use are inadequte comparedwith masculin forms. In Ukrainian most profession nouns in Ukrainian are typical grammatically-mixed-gender nouns (that allow to be used both as grammatically-masculine and grammatically-feminine). For example, the word директор – male and female “director”.
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