ON THE GRAMMATICAL RESTRICTIONS OF THE USE OF FEMINATIVES IN THE UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE

This article is focused on the grammatical and social aspects of the use of feminatives in the Ukrainian language. It was shown that the unreasonable use of feminatives may result in a number of inconsistencies leading to violation of grammatical and phonological rules and to the degradation of the language expressive ability. Helping little to make a woman more visible, this practice leaves no room to correctly denote non-binary persons and personified objects. It is also shown that the feminatives with the final «-kynja» are questionable from the phonological view. To resolve the grammatical issues resulting from the feminative usage, we propose to recognize the general gender that, similarly to the common one, is a complex gender. In contrast to the common gender, the general gender combines simple genders by means of the logical «OR» instead of the «AND». The corresponding names should be used in place of the masculine nouns in the generalizing functio