Morphosyntactic Adaptation of Recent English Loanwords in Bulgarian
Morphosyntactic Adaptation of Recent English Loanwords in Bulgarian

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the morphosyntactic adaptation of the most recent English loanwords in Bulgarian based on a corpus of online articles published in 2014. It examines the gender and number adaptation of nouns, the extent to which adjectives are integrated, as well as the major categories of verbs. The study demonstrates that the mechanisms for nativising borrowings outlined in the specialist literature operate reasonably consistently and with relatively few exceptions. At the same time, we also come across some phenomena which have so far eluded the radar of linguists, thus remaining unrecorded for Bulgarian. For instance, some Anglicisms in the sample were formally assigned to the masculine gender, although they exclusively denote females without being dual-gender nouns. There were also signs of incipient derivational adaptation of such items. Adding plural suffixes to loanwords is well known to involve violations of typically Bulgarian patterns and alternations. In addition, we discover previously undescribed forms with zero plurals or with the productive English -s morpheme. This testifies to the current intensity of contact between the two languages. Following an increasingly familiar trend, the vast majority of adjectives were left indeclinable, instead of receiving Slavonic derivational suffixes which would have allowed them to agree with their head nouns. Despite the paucity of verbs in the corpus, they seem to exhibit the opposite tendency of being successfully accommodated to the Bulgarian aspectual system.

• Details
• Contents