ENGLISH INTERNATIONALISMS AND THEIR EFFECT ON BULGARIAN.

Rapid scientific and technological progress has enriched the lexical stores of languages. The aim of the present study is to present some changes that occur in the Bulgarian lexicon caused by the scientific or technological achievements. One of the tendencies characteristic of contemporary Bulgarian is the abundance of neologisms, more specifically, neologisms borrowed from English or created due to the impact of the English language. The assimilation of loans differs from language to language. The richer and more varied the word-forming potential of a language, the stronger the assimilation processes. A good example of this are the newly borrowed words in modern Bulgarian adopted from English. Conversion is a way of word-formation widely used in coining neologisms, in which they shift from one part of speech into another, most frequently a borrowed noun turns into a verb as in лайк (noun) ‘like’ – лайквам (verb) ‘like’. This process involves not only grammatical but also semantic change. For the purpose of assimilation of the loans, the language applies other means of word-formation like affixation and compounding. Some neologisms obtained from English give rise to whole word families, e.g., from the abbreviation PR were formed пиараджийски, пиарменски, пиарменство, пиаролог, пиарология, пиарщина, пиаря/пиаря се, etc. We use several methods for the research, namely, the descriptive method, the method of analytical comparison and the method of immediate constituents. The article analyses neologisms of the modern Bulgarian language according to the way of coinage and semantic characteristics. New words are discussed which have arisen during the last ten years. Due to the research we clarify that in the newest tendencies of modern Bulgarian the influence of neologisms is clearly revealed. The study is based on two corpora compiled from online and printed dictionaries. The English corpus contains 370 new words, while the Bulgarian corpus comprises 320 new words. The greatest share among the investigated neologisms is taken by nouns that denote entities and phenomena important for the present-day society. Word building patterns with one or two English constituents are frequent and certain neologisms are borrowed from English without any changes. In terms of frequency, the next most frequent are adjectives, and verbs are the ones that occur least frequently. In the course of time, the newly-coined words either become part of the lexical stock of the language and stop being considered as neologism or are no longer used and gradually forgotten. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]