An Anglo-Americanism in Slavic morphosyntax: Productive [N[N]] constructions in Bulgarian

• Autores: Cynthia M. Vakareliyska, Vsevolod Kapatsinski
• Localización: Folia lingüística: Acta Societatis Linguisticae Europaeae, ISSN-e 1614-7308, ISSN 0165-4004, Vol. 48, Nº 1, 2014, págs. 277-312
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Since 1990, most of the South and East Slavic languages have independently adopted, to varying extents, English loanblend [N[N]] constructions, in which an English modifier noun is followed by a head noun that previously existed in the language, for example, Bulgarian ekšŭn geroi ‘action heroes’. This phenomenon is of particular interest from a morphosyntactic processing perspective, because the use of the English noun as a modifier without the addition of a Slavic adjectival suffix and agreement desinence is a violation of fundamental traditional principles of Slavic morphology and morphosyntax, and thus should pose considerable parsing challenges. Bulgarian has incorporated English loanblend [N[N]]’s particularly well into the standard language. In this article we argue that the high frequency, broad semantic range, and productivity of loanblend [N[N]]’s in Bulgarian are the direct result not of Bulgarian’s analytic case-marking system per se, but of preexisting construction types in the language.