RUSSIAN EPICENE NOUNS: MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND SYNTACTIC BEHAVIOUR

Russian epicenes are a fascinating class of words, which is continuously enriched with new formations. Nouns of common gender tend to be stylistically marked as colloquial or sub-standard, are typically used in less formal registers and are endowed with strong connotations towards the referent. This paper reports the findings of a survey conducted in order to investigate the patterns of agreement of epicene nouns in contemporary Russian. Results show that in structuring a sentence within a certain stretch of discourse, Russian associates a discourse-relevant entity with a choice of agreement that signals this relevance in discourse. Strategies aimed at signalling the information structuring of discourse play a substantial and hitherto ignored role in the agreement of epicenes, with formal, morphological agreement marked with respect to semantic agreement.