GENDER NARRATIVES IN THE MASS MEDIA: FEMINITIVES vs MASCULINATIVES

Abstract

The article describes the trends in the use of feminitives and masculinatives in media discourse in view of their lexical-semantic and formal-grammatical properties in the context of observing gender-correct speech. The application of the descriptive method made it possible to characterize the formal-grammatical and lexical-semantic properties of feminine and masculine forms; 2) the analysis of dictionary definitions contributed to the establishment of lexical-semantic groups of representatives of social gender in the language of mass media; 3) the modeling method made it possible to determine the lexical-grammatical models of verbalizers of social gender; 4) the contextual-interpretive method made it possible to reveal stereotypical tendencies in the functioning of feminitives and masculinatives. A means of achieving gender-correct communication is gender-sensitive speech - the use of language resources, in particular, feminine vocabulary to designate women by occupation or profession, with the aim of avoiding gender discrimination in media speech in particular. The Ukrainian language has a significant potential for maintaining gender-correct speech: gender lexemes represented by masculine or feminine grammes; bigender - from a grammatical point of view, split into two generic forms, devoid of immanent signs of femininity / masculinity, but able to name both female and male persons by type of activity or profession; agender, which are characterized by the systematic independence of gender characteristics from the grammatical gender, can be expressed by any gender grammes. In the mass media discourse, there is a tendency to activate feminisms, which is a vivid manifestation of the language policy aimed at expanding this lexical-semantic group, establishing a gender culture in the language. At the same time, the use of feminitives in the language of mass media has not become systematic: there are lexical gaps in the names of women's professions, gender asymmetry (grammatical and semantic), which are explained by the situational-pragmatic use of bigender and agender tokens as names of women according to their social roles; there are manifestations of stereotypical ideas about the social roles of men and women.