SPECIFICS OF THE USE OF FEMINITIVES IN ENGLISH, FRENCH AND RUSSIAN LANGUAGES ON THE MATERIAL OF THE ACTUAL PRESS

Abstract

The article has been conducted in the context of the sociolinguistic approach from the standpoint of the feminist linguistics. It breaks down the features of the usage of feminitives in English, French, and Russian languages based on the material of the actual press. The main purpose of this research is analyzing and comparing the strategies of these languages for gender specification and neutralization. The incomplete knowledge of that topic, as well as the active feminist movement, provide the relevance of the research. Analyzing the material aggregated with the continuous sampling method showed that all three languages still apply masculine lexemes for women’s representation and rarely use feminitives, which tend to be used in the pro-feminist or liberal magazines and the articles dedicated to successful or famous women. The conducted analysis also showed that in English language there are more language means for the gender-specified lexicon elimination than there are in French and Russian languages. Accordingly, the usage of the gender-neutral vocabulary in English language is more frequent. Within the frames of studying the Anglophone publicistic discource, the British and the American magazines and newspapers were analyzed individually, which, however, has not led to identifying any fundamental differences in the usage of feminitives or methods of the neutralization of gender.