Interplay Between Nomination Tendencies in the Language of Mass Media. The Case of the Analytical Adjectives

The thesis aims to describe and theoretically explain the range of complex nominal word structures and phrases that evolved in all Slavic languages with staggering productivity during the last decades. In particular, it focuses on the so called analytical adjectives, i.e. formally invariant lexical units mostly of foreign origin that manifest their attributive syntactic role (and the word class they belong to) not through a morpheme but through fixed word order position. The thesis rejects the view that analytical adjectives are first parts of compound words and explores several transitional cases. In more general terms, the thesis explores phenomena that test the boundary between words and phrases, morphology and syntax. It concludes that in Bulgarian there already exists a well established word subclass of analytical adjectives. They have resulted from an originally lexical innovation that has been grammatcalized due to intensive borrowings of words and phrase models mainly from English and their replication. The comparative study of present-day Bulgarian and Czech provides evidence of the strategies that the two genetically related languages use to achieve their nomination goals. The search for an explanation of the similarities and differences between both languages offers insights into their..