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Некоторые слова в зависимости от рода имеют разный смысл, например, "машинист" и "машинистка" — это совершенно разные профессии. Есть ли название у такого языкового феномена?

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  • Очень может быть, что у таких слов нет названия.
    – Dmitry
    Sep 2, 2018 at 17:00
  • если явление само по себе очень редкое, то названия оно может и не иметь Sep 2, 2018 at 20:09
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    Не совсем об этом, но очень сходные случаи (т.н. феминитивы) обсуждает Кронгауз. Он упоминает пример, что изначально "слово «докторша» обозначало не женщину в этой профессии, а жену доктора." chrdk.ru/other/feminitivy У него в Фейсбуке была очень интересная дискуссия на эту тему (месяцев три-пять назад?).
    – Alex B.
    Sep 3, 2018 at 2:49
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    There is a class of nouns in Spanish which change their meaning with change in gender: la cometa "kite" / el cometa / "comet", la papa "potato" / el papa "pope" etc. They are called "polysemic nouns" (sustantivos polisémicos), although "polysemy" is a much wider term. There is another class of nouns which don't change their grammatical gender when denoting an object of another biological sex: el delfín and la paloma mean "dolphin" and "dove" of either sex. This is called "epicene gender". Those terms are the closest things to the answer to your question that I'm aware of.
    – Quassnoi
    Sep 3, 2018 at 13:51
  • I've updated my answer with a new suggestion of my own )
    – shabunc
    May 14, 2019 at 10:06

1 Answer 1

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There's no specific term a single word one can use however there are some related terminology. Generally speaking this is a phenomena of gender-related semantic differences - when grammatical gender affects the way perceive the word. Technically nothing stops a woman from being called машинистка and riding trains or генеральша to rule an army however de-facto there exist a shift in meaning because of which when we think of машинистка we picture to ourselves woman typing.

When one word has positive connotation and it's counterpart has negative this differentiation is called gender-related semantic polarization (in Russian I've seen семантическая полярность or семантическая поляризация). In Russian one example of such polarization would be the pair стерва/стервец where "стервец" is way more neutral than "стерва".

In Russian-language articles I've never encountered specific dedicated term however once I've seen ложная гендерная парность.

UPD: I figured out that on English SE they sometimes come up with their own suggestion if no relevant term has been found. So after some investigation I'm suggesting following term - квазифеминитив. So, the word машинистка would be a квазифеминитив, and машинист/машинистка would be пара с квазифеминитивом.

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