Граматически и семантични фактори при определяне рода на английските заемки в български език (Grammatical and semantic factors in determining the gender of English loan-words

This paper deals with the various grammatical and semantic factors which determine the gender of English loan-words in Bulgarian. The corpus consists of 180 nouns borrowed from English into Bulgarian. The study is based on the classification of formal and semantic gender determiners offered by J. Welna. This classification turns out to be applicable to Bulgarian, a language with a highly developed grammatical gender patterning. The formal factors affect the greater part of the loan-words but the semantic ones hold for Bulgarian just as well. The number of loan-words whose gender is semantically determined confirms the activity of the semantic elements in the process of gender assignment.