Zvezda ‘star’ and legenda ‘legend’ as common gender nouns: corpus analysis of variability in agreement

The article is devoted to the analysis of agreement of the nouns legenda ‘legend’ and zvezda (‘star’) in the figurative metaphorical meaning ‘celebrity’ in comparison with common gender nouns. Strategies of agreement of common gender nouns are analyzed according to the description of the category of common gender nouns in linguistic studies from mid-20th century to our days.
The study is based on the materials of the Russian National Corpus, General Internet Corpus of Russian, and examples from media texts of 2016 to 2019. The author comes to the conclusion that the past tense form of the verb has a tendency to agree with the nouns zvezda and legenda depending on the gender of the denotated person, similarly to common gender nouns, despite the fact that such agreement is non-normative. Moreover, the past tense form of the verb as well as adjectives agree with the noun superstar ‘superstar’ in both masculine and feminine gender.