The aim of the current study is to reveal asymmetries in the linguistic encoding of male and female persons in Slovak by analyzing ample lexical material from a synchronic perspective.
Specifically, I examine a corpus of over 60,000 lemmas, document a sub-corpus of approximately 6,000 personal nouns, devise a taxonomy model of sixteen semantic classes based on Dickins (2001), and classify the Slovak personal nouns by semantic class. I further examine in detail the issue of the relationship between significant types of asymmetries (lexical gaps determined by biological, social, cultural and/or historical roles of men and women within the family unit, community, or society; gaps which are attributed to formal constraints; parallel designations for women and men with a semantic difference; epicene nouns; and double-gender nouns) and the semantic classes in which those asymmetries tend to occur.
Based on the linguistic evidence, I determine which semantic classes show tendencies towards symmetrical gender relationships, and which classes resist forming parallel terms for male and female referents.
The current analysis of the Slovak data contrasts with numerous articles dealing with gender asymmetry in that it shows that the tendency towards gender symmetry is greater than in some other related languages, for instance Czech and Polish.