Rabotnitsa and bezdel’nitsa: russian femininitives with suffix -nitsa

The article is concerned with the actual linguistic problem – the functioning of the designations of females with the suffix formant -ниц(а) / -nits(a) in modern Russian. The suffix -ниц(а) / -nits(a) is one of the most popular means of forming the derivational category of feminitivity, distinguished based on commonness of derivational meaning ‘a female person belonging to the category of persons called a motivating noun’. The relevance of the study is determined by the increasing significance of female denominations as an object of linguistic research, as well as their activity in modern Russian media space. We understand media space as a global communication environment created by electronic means. The article has developed a classification of feminitives with the suffix -ниц(а) / -nits(a) based on the formal structure of a productive word. The language material for our study is 635 lexemes with the indicated suffix, selected from authoritative dictionaries of the modern Russian language, the National Corpora of the Russian language and the data from various Internet resources. The paper makes the conclusion about the stylistic universality of the female designations with the suffix -ниц(а) / -nits(a), that is, their ability to function in different styles of speech; lists social and linguistic factors under the influence of which the changes in this point of the derivational system occur