Simplifying grammatical gender in inflectional languages: Odessa Russian and beyond

Abstract

This work aims to contribute to the analysis of the morphosyntactic processes of gender assignment and gender agreement in inflectional languages, through the study of gender variation in Russian. We will focus on the data of a special contact variety, Odessa Russian (OdR), and compare it to standard, dialectal, child Russian, as well as other contact varieties of Russian. OdR is a linguistic variety slightly decomplexified by non-native acquisition, which arises from a special language contact situation; it originated as a lingua franca, and was passed on later to successive generations of speakers as a native variety. Some of the most striking features of OdR are its divergences in gender assignment and agreement with respect to Standard Russian. The specific processes analysed in this paper are classified in three groups: (i) loss of a gender value (neuter gender), by virtue if a strategy of gender (re)assignment; (ii) transfer or ‘migration’ of gender according to the phonological shape of the words involved (masculine into feminine and feminine into masculine); interestingly, formal rules in this group of processes can sometimes prevail over semantic rules (i. e. over natural gender); and (iii) disruptions of gender agreement (associated with disruption of grammatical case), which can be interpreted as the simplification of the corresponding syntactic tree by eliminating uninterpretable gender features in the language. We will show that these processes go beyond mere substrata effects, and proceed according to more general processes that partially take place also in other (contact and non-contact) varieties of Russian. More specifically: (i) occasional changes in the assignment and agreement of gender are reminiscent of dialectal Russian, but are more widespread in OdR (closer to child language) than in those varieties; (ii) even if gender in OdR was not lost as a grammatical category, some productions point to a partial loss of gender features, reminding us of pidgins and heritage languages.