Helicopter Moms and Майки-орлици – The Crossways of Determinative Nominal Compounding and Its Interpretations

Authors:

Pages: 227-242
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/TECJ8814

Abstract:

The interpretation and analysis of determinative (root) nominal compounding in the Anglo-Saxon and Bulgarian linguistic traditions are contrasted with the aim of illustrating that pattern or structural borrowing should be accompanied by introducing into the target language metalinguistic discourses, the interpretation of the phenomenon in the source language metalinguistic discourses or at least employ comparative concepts in order to recognize the phenomenon for what it is. The crosstalk between linguistic conceptualizations of a uniform phenomenon, which violates none of the linguistic systems yet fails to be recognized for what it is in the target language, leads to overzealous loyalty to language particularism, a Slavic, morpheme-based approach to word formation and unnecessary classificatory chopping into different groups of formally and semantically uniform items. Starting from misconceptions of headedness and intracompound relations, майка-орлица [mayka orlica, “mother eagle”, helicopter mom] is interpreted in Bulgarian as an instance of izafet, or a compositionally formed phrasal complex name with an implicit comparison semantic operator, while in English its semantic counterpart, helicopter mom/parent, is simply recognized as a figuratively coined determinative nominal compound. The non-recognition of the identity of this phenomenon in the two languages is a fallout of the analytical models adopted and their non-translatability. Accepting less classification-obsessed linguistic approaches to analysing linguistic creativity in the field of word formation reduces extant crosstalk and enhances crosslinguistic cross-pollination in (meta)linguistic terms. What is at crossways is the metalinguistic discourses, not the language phenomena.

Keywords:

determinative nominal compounds, figurativity, comparative categories, English, Bulgarian

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