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2 THE NOUN 2.0 GENERAL REMARKS In this chapter we describe the characteristics of the Ukrainian noun: gender, number, and case; these are followed by an overview of the syntactic properties of the noun (such as case government, occurrence with prepositions), and a presentation of the most productive processes of nominal word formation. 2.1 GENDER All Ukrainian nouns have gender: that is, they are identified as either 'masculine', 'feminine', or 'neuter', as is the case in German, Russian, Latin, Greek, et al. Some nouns will be 'masculine' or 'feminine' because they refer to male or female biological entities (such as дочка 'daughter'); this phenomenon is termed 'natural gender'. A small number can refer to males or to females while being grammatically 'feminine'; compare дитина 'child', людина 'person'. The vast majority of nouns have 'grammatical gender', as they are marked for gender without a biological basis; thus, for example, стіл 'table', is masculine but does not represent a male being. All nouns carry a 'gender marker'; it is the last sound (not necessarily letter) of a word in the nominative case (the 'dictionary' or 'citation form') that will generally indicate to which grammatical gender it is assigned. Some of these markers are unambiguous, such that the gender of the noun in question is immediately clear, while others can signal two possible genders; in the latter instance, semantic clues (if a person is being represented) or particular suffixes can give hints as to which gender is involved (as a rule one gender per suffix). The gender of a significant number of nouns borrowed from non-Slavonic languages can be opaque: as a rule, those ending in a consonant are masculine, while those in -a are feminine; all others, especially those involving final vowels other than -a, vary from instance to instance. All of the possible patterns of gender distribution, including borrowings, are outlined in the following sections. |
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скачати Stefan M. Pugh and Ian Press. Ukrainian: a comprehensive grammar.