Наблюдения върху съществителните със семантичен общ род в съвременния български и новогръцки език
Observations on Common-gender Nouns in Contemporary Bulgarian and Greek

Summary/Abstract: This study is dedicated to the formal, semantic, and stylistic properties of common-gender nouns (i.e., nouns referring to both masculine and feminine entities) in contemporary Bulgarian and Greek. In Bulgarian, this category includes common personal nouns such as пияница (drunkard), невежа (ignoramus), хаймана (loafer), будала (fool), among others. These nouns have been thoroughly studied in Bulgarian linguistics, where they are regarded as a manifestation of gender defectivity. Formally, they agree with masculine or feminine modifiers when referring to male individuals (e.g., Той е голям/голяма невежа – “He is a big ignoramus”) and only with feminine modifiers when referring to women or children (e.g., Тя е голяма невежа – “She is a big ignoramus”; То е голяма невежа – “The child is a big ignoramus”). Semantically, common-gender nouns foreground a characteristic of the referent independent of biological sex. Stylistically, they are predominantly used in colloquial speech, though they also appear in literary and journalistic contexts. Comparative research on these nouns is scarce; this paper represents the first attempt at a contrastive analysis with an unrelated language – contemporary Greek. Regarding their origin, in both Bulgarian and Greek, some nouns are Turkisms, while others are native lexemes or loans from other languages. In Greek, such nouns are used with either the definite or indefinite article in masculine or feminine form, depending on the gender of the referent. Moreover, common-gender nouns in this neighbouring Balkan language are considerably more semantically stratified: many of them, such as profession names or ethnonyms, belong to the neutral lexicon, while another group is stylistically marked and used to characterise individuals.

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