An Anglo-Americanism in Slavic morphosyntax: Productive [N[N]] constructions in Bulgarian
-
Cynthia M. Vakareliyska
and
Vsevolod Kapatsinski
Abstract
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
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- How nominal compounds are modified by two adjectives
- The interpretation of encapsulating anaphors in Spanish and their functions
- Unaccusatives and unergatives: Evidence from Croatian
- Bipositions and motion events: How verb semantics motivates prepositional vs. postpositional uses of Finnish path adpositions
- The birth of a new resultative construction in Spanish: A corpus-based description
- The acquisition of determiners in child L2 German
- Discourse objectivization, social variation and style of Spanish second-person singular tú
- Comprehension of degree modifiers by pre-school children: What does it mean to be ‘a bit cold’?
- An Anglo-Americanism in Slavic morphosyntax: Productive [N[N]] constructions in Bulgarian
- BOOK REVIEWS
- MISCELLANEA
