Non-usual feminitives in media discourse: An active process

Abstract

The active process of non-usual feminitives’ creation and its distribution in modern media discourse is studied. The object of the study is feminitive neologisms with the suffix -к- (авторка ‘female author’, блогерка ‘female blogger’, редакторка ‘female editor’, режиссерка ‘female director’, etc.) in media discourse. The material of the study is a self-assembled corpus of non-usual feminitives in the media. The corpus, compiled using the keyword search technique and marked manually, contains 699 contexts. The source of the material are electronic media of various ideological and thematic orientations, with the wide audience and important place in the modern media discourse. Identified feminitives were analyzed with the method of structural-semantic, word-formation analysis, contexts were studied using discursive, pragmatic, metapragmatic analysis. The active word-formation process is analyzed in a complex way from a structural, semantic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic point of view, which motivates the novelty of the study. The functioning of non-usual feminitives in media texts (both in the author’s speech and in interviewees’ direct speech) indicates the presence of an active process of feminitives’ distribution in the media discourse, previously recorded mainly in informal Internet communication. As a result of the analysis, the semantics of frequent non-usual feminitives was studied. The features of feminitives’ functioning in various media were revealed in correlation with its ideological and thematic orientation, characteristics of the target audience. In a pragmatic aspect, the main functions of non-usual feminitives in media texts were analyzed: nominative, stylistic functions, functions of identification and self-identification, the function of an object of metalinguistic reflection.