Optimizing Russian Gender: A preliminary analysis

Research has established that nouns are assigned to gender classes as a function of meaning and shape (Corbett 1991, Comrie 1999). Once this point has been made for several individual languages, research should move towards the establishment of a typologically robust theory of gender assignment. One example of such a theory is optimal gender assignment theory (Rice 2004), which formalizes several of the key insights in Steinmetz’ (1985, 1986) theory. A robust theory of gender assignment must identify the general principles that are relevant for gender assignment, while at the same time providing a strategy for correctly assigning nouns to their gender category. The burdens on a theory of gender assignment also include the requirement that the theory be crosslinguistically robust. Finally, the construction of a theory of gender assignment should avoid theoretical idiosyncrasies and instead aspire to a formalism independently shown to be motivated for other domains of grammar.