Characteristics of Feminitives in Russian-Language Media Discourse

Abstract

The article presents preliminary comments explaining the popularity of feminitives, and arguments regarding the reasons for the emergence of new forms in the Russian.

In the Russian-language media space there is a limited number of lexical units that are actively used and criticized by communicants. Newly emerged models of feminitives represent women whose activities are related to the media, the arts, and education. There are no professional qualifications related to working specialties successfully mastered by women. The unproductiveness of morphological transformations of new lexemes is the result of the use of a small number of acceptable suffixes at the disposal of discourse participants.

Feminitives of the new wave, as a means of struggle by participants in the feminist movement and active representatives of the blogosphere for the Russian-language media space, indicate not only the subject’s affinity for a certain professional activity, but also participate in marking a person’s gender. A factor slowing down the process of dissemination of feminitives in various media contents is a violation of consistency in the language, for example, the influence of accentological rules of the Russian on the creation of new lexical variants. Active participants in feminist movements laid down a conceptual framework that allows the use of a limited number of possible models of feminitives.