polceny

[Michael Betsch]

Ë (At) 10:22 Uhr +0100 28.01.1998, Ralph Cleminson Žcrivait (wrote)Ê:
>On Tue, 27 Jan 1998  Michael Yadroff <myadroff at indiana.edu>
>wrote:
>> Today in a certain E-R dictionary I encountered  a word
>> _polceny_ (as a translation of E. _half-price_) with
>> grammatical info (noun, feminine). This is evidently
>> incorrect.
>
>It all depends on how you define gender, I suppose.  Modern Russian
>has now reached the stage where (except for nouns in -a or -ja
>denoting male persons) gender is identified with declensional type.
>Since, for example, polchashki has Gsg poluchashki, Dsg poluchashke
>etc., and polchasa has Gsg poluchasa, Dsg poluchasu etc., then the
>former can be regarded as belonging to a feminine declensional type
>and the latter as belonging to a masculine declensional type, and
>this considered as meaning that they are respectively feminine and
>masculine.
>
>If we deduce gender from agreement, things are more complicated, as
>these nouns in the N take neuter singular agreement of verbs and
>plural agreement of adjectives and pronouns.  In oblique cases,
>however, they take the gender of the declensional type to which they
>belong: iz etoj poluchashki.

It also depends on whether you consider words of the type _polceny_ one
single word at all. The "orfoepicheskii slovar" (M. 1983) proposes (pp.
701-702) that they should be viewed as syntactic combinations of the
element _pol_ and a noun, because the syntactic properties are similar to
combinations of nouns with numerals (e.g. dva chasa) and _pol_ can be
almost freely combined with suitable nouns. The traditional viewpoint,
however, is that _polceny_ is a feminine noun and so on, so the E-R
dictionary cited simply stuck to this traditional view.



__________________________________________________________________________
Michael Betsch
Kaesenbachstrasse 10
72076 Tuebingen, FRG
Tel.:+49 7071/51917
email: Michael.Betsch at Uni-Tuebingen.DE
__________________________________________________________________________