Folia Linguistica 48/1 (2014), 277–311. doi 10.1515/flin.2014.009 issn 0165–4004, e-issn 1614–7308 © Mouton de Gruyter – Societas Linguistica Europaea An Anglo-Americanism in Slavic morphosyntax: Productive [N[N]] constructions in Bulgarian 1 Cynthia M. Vakareliyska and Vsevolod Kapatsinski Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon 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’. is 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 prin- ciples of Slavic morphology and morphosyntax, and thus should pose consider- able 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 Bul- garian are the direct result not of Bulgarian’s analytic case-marking system per se, but of preexisting construction types in the language. Keywords: loanblends, open compounds, grammatical borrowing, morphosyn- tax, agreement, Bulgarian, Slavic 1 We would like to express our gratitude to our consultant specialists, who so generously provided data to us in personal communication, and we also thank the audience members who offered valuable comments to an earlier version of this article, “Construction Borrow- ing from English into Slavic Languages”, presented by Cynthia Vakareliyska at the Univer- sity of Oslo on 22 March 2011. Finally, we are most grateful to the anonymous reviewers, and to Hubert Cuyckens of Folia Linguistica for his invaluable post-acceptance reorganizational suggestions, which have greatly improved this article. Of course, we alone are responsible for any errors. Brought to you by | University of Georgia Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 5/29/15 11:23 AM