Problematic cases of forming personal feminine nouns in Ukrainian corpora and dictionaries

Background. Feminine personal nouns in Ukrainian have increased in frequency at a high rate over the past years. This highly dynamic expansion has created difficulties with some designations.Contribution to the research field. The findings show that a combination of language panel results and analyses of corpus data yields otherwise unattainable insights into the highly dynamic lexicon group and should be used by lexicographers and researchers concerned with such. More specifically, the author establishes which problematic cases with feminine terms have been resolved since 2022 and which remain in status nascendi.Purpose. The purpose of the study is to compare survey and corpus data and show how they can be applied to resolving problematic cases of feminine noun derivation in Ukrainian.Methods. Corpus analysis, involving both quantitative and qualitative aspects, is used to study textual data, and the comparative method is applied to compare survey and corpus results. Morphemic and derivational analysis are involved in the treatment of personal feminine nouns.Results. The author has analyzed 30 problematic cases of feminine derivation and found converging survey and corpus data from 2021–2022 suggesting that 14 feminine terms previously thought to be problematic have become established as primary nominations. In the other cases considered here in detail, the results are mixed, with several variants vying for supremacy and corpus data either being insufficient or contradicting survey results.Discussion. Feminine personal nouns are a highly dynamic lexical group in Ukrainian, marked by speakers’ experimentation and competition among variant forms. It has experienced fast, steady if somewhat disorderly, expansion since (and partly due to) the Revolution of Dignity. Still, it has undergone partial structuring over the past years, as this study shows. Several productive derivational models have become established, and compound feminine nouns are shown to play an important role as a safe choice in complicated cases. Corpus data has proven to be an indispensable complement to survey results in obtaining an accurate picture of the lexical group under study. Lexicographic coverage of Ukrainian feminine terms has improved over the past five years, but more corpus-based work needs to be done in this area. Lexicographers and linguists are advised to combine survey and corpus data in their studies.