Gender Semantics of Nominations <i>родитель – родительница – родители</i> in Modern Media Discourse

Abstract

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to identify manifestation patterns of gender semantics of Russian nouns родитель – родительница – родители (pluralia tantum) in different referent and context conditions. The research is based on newspaper subcorpora of Russian National Corpus. Results. The vocabulary values are marked by gender semes: родитель (father), родительница (mother), родители (father and mother – the separate lexeme). The first two nouns are characterized by a reduced stylistic meaning. They are also evaluated as outdated, but it does not confirm in modern Russian speech. The feminitive родительница retains a gender meaning in all types of usage, it is often used as a neutral synonym for мать (mother). It shows a clear tendency towards stylistic neutrality. At the same time it has a negative connotative background and can be used for reducing the social and personal status of the referent. The word родитель is a male nomination if denotes a particular person. For a generalized referent or if as a logical predicate, the gender seme is not preserved. Colloquial coloration is preserved only when the word referents a particular person. The meaning of the noun родители with semes of the bigender couple is fully realized only if it denotes a particular family or nominates a social role attributed to a particular family. In other cases it has non-gendered semantics, and becomes the plural form of родитель as ‘person with offspring’. Conclusion. We suppose changes in the semantic structure of the noun родитель can affect the lexical and morphological status of the word родители.