Abstrakt

Feminatives, defined as feminine gender nouns denoting exclusively females, and their status in Contemporary Macedonian language, observed through their presence in the publicistic register i.e. journalistic sub-register, are the subject of this work. The author notices that the number of feminatives on the pages of the Macedonian daily papers is very extensive. This, he believes, is a result of their functionality. At the same time the feminatives are an important testimony of the status improvement of the females in the society. The evidence gathered from the Contemporary Macedonian language material proves that the feminatives, in the Contemporary Macedonian language, do not possess inherent expressive meaning, as opposed to the masculine correlatives, as was believed in the past by some Macedonian linguists. The presence as well as the absence of the feminatives in the Macedonian language is a result of a number of factors, which are very often tightly intertwined. The factors that give rise to the presence of the feminatives are the grammatical structure of the Macedonian language, the clarity of the expressions (whether we talk about a male or a female person), as well as the economic- ity of the expressions. The factors against the feminatives are: morphonological impediments, inter-lingual influence, redundancy, the ambiguity of some expressions that contain feminatives, the extra-linguistic situation. Although less in number, the stronger factors are on the side of the feminatives, so the author believes that their presence in the future can only increase.