Linguistics, Interpretations, Concepts (LInC)

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p-ISSN: 3033-0181 / e-ISSN: 3033-0599

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1922 – 1925 in BULGARIA – LITERATURE, LITERARY CRITICISM and POLITICS
(Plovdiv University Press “Paisii Hilendarski”, 2024-04-21) Protohristova, Kleo
This text aims at analysing literary life in Bulgaria between 1922 and 1925. The analysis is motivated by the dominant impression of its extraordinary intensity and draws upon the assumption that the chronological stretch is self-contained as a distinct micro-period in national literary history. The goal of this research is to endorse the hypothesis that the projection potential in the dynamics of the examined time span is meaningful. Observations have been carried out in the mode of H. R. Jauss’s “synchronic cross-sections” and include contextualising parallels with the respective literary years in Western European literature.
45 YEARS IS NOT ENOUGH: AN IDEA THAT SHOOK THE WORLD OF LINGUISTICS
(Plovdiv University Press "Paisii Hilendarski", 2024) Dagnev, Ivaylo
Conceptual metaphor theory emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and viewed the process and product of metaphorization as a complex interrelationship between language and thought. A central claim of this theory proposed by Lakoff & Johnson and subsequently developed by numerous researchers is that the apperception of the unknown takes place through a special process of construction in semantics – metaphorization, which results from the complex interaction between embodied experience, the conceptual system and its linguistic representation. The evolution of the theory problematises many essential issues of semantics such as the meaning and use of words, the relationship between literal and figurative meaning, between the conceptual character and the lexical expression in language. Like any significant idea, the theory of conceptual metaphor has become the target of numerous criticisms on all its aspects, which, after all, are the necessary driving force for its development.
ANDREY PLATONOV: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOTEXTUALITY
(Plovdiv University Press "Paisii Hilendarski", 2024) Kiossev, Alexander
Following a methodology developed by Radosvet Kolarov, which relativizes „the death of the author“ and turns it into an inner-textual mechanism, this article deals with the complex and dramatic biography of the great writer Andrey Platonov. An attempt is made to analyze it as an organizing auto-poetic principle of his creative work. The transformations of enduring ideological and emotional motives that start from the early Platonov and reach his late works are traced; the principles of auto-citation, transformation, and auto-polemics are analyzed. The conclusions comment on the special phantasmal core present in every ideology and the possibility of it being manipulated politically.
AUTHORS AND FIGHTERS, ROMANCES, COFFEE-HOUSES: SOME POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS PRECEDING THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE NOVEL “UNDER THE YOKE”
(Plovdiv University Press “Paisii Hilendarski”, 2024-04-21) Zlatanov, Blagovest
The article reconstructs and analyses in detail previously unknown events, statements, and interrelations in a series of political developments preceding the English translation of Ivan Vazov's novel “Under the Yoke”, published in London at the very end of 1893. Two main issues fall into the focus of research interest. First, for what reason was the author Ivan Vazov considered an immediate participant in the struggles for national liberation of Bulgaria? And secondly, why are efforts being made to define “Under the Yoke” as a “romance”? As a final accent, the article answers the question why the novel includes a coffee-house that afterwards became so famous in Bulgarian literature and cultural history.
CLASSIFICATION AND VARIATION OF FIXED EXPRESSIONS IN BULGARIAN
(Plovdiv University Press “Paisii Hilendarski”, 2024-04-27) Zidarova, Vanya
Fixed expressions comprise a large, specific and diverse group of linguistic units which makes them a serious theoretical and lexicographical challenge. This article offers a review of the existing classifications. There is also a new model proposed – one which distinguishes between a core and a periphery. Manifestations of structural variability are also considered in two directions: in language and in speech. The observations are based on the corpus in one of the Bulgarian phraseological dictionaries.
CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS: LIFE IS A JOURNEY IN DOCTOR MARIGOLD BY CHARLES DICKENS
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025) Kyriakakis, Efstratios
This paper explores the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) to the language and narrative structure of Charles Dickens’ short story Doctor Marigold. It identifies and discusses some of the numerous correspondences between the source domain and target domain which underpin the structural metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, such as THE PERSON LEADING A LIFE IS A TRAVELER, HIS PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS, THE MEANS OF ACHIEVING PURPOSES ARE ROUTES, etc. The analysis establishes the rich mapping nature of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor which might provide an explanation for its being an entrenched metaphor. This metaphor also structures the whole narrative of the short story. The linguistic evidence and the narrative structure reveal the cognitive processes in which both everyday and literary language are grounded.
DIMINUTIVES IN RABBIE BURNS’ POETIC PIECES (AND THEIR TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS IN RUSSIAN, FRENCH AND GERMAN)
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025) Chankova, Yana; Bagasheva, Maria; Kiryakova-Dineva, Teodora; Todorov, Blagovest
The present paper is part of a more comprehensive and extended re-search project which seeks to investigate and quantitatively and qualitatively analyse the data obtained with respect to the diminutive forms attested in the poetic works of Robert Burns and their respective translation equivalents in Russian, French and German. What we present here is a pilot study on the diminutive forms in the original poetic texts and in their translations into the three languages. The aim is to investigate the types of form-formative patterns of expressing diminutiveness and their function in the respective languages. The discussion opens with a brief outline of the specific features of the category of diminutiveness in the studied languages.
EXILE AS A TRAUMATIC PRETEXT OF A COUNTERNARRATIVE LITERATURE: THE MUSEUM OF UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER BY DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025) Kambourov, Dimitar
The text undertakes another attempt to read Ugrešić’s great novel from the viewpoint of the recent phenomenon of an East European world literature. It is an attempt to demonstrate how features such as counter-narrativity, anti-fictionality, and non-linearity, summoning key novels by Tokarczuk, Cărtărescu, Krasznahorkai, and Gospodinov, find their paradigmatic model in the novel of this Croatian exile. Her prose invents and implements the paradoxical regime of an intellectual commentary distance, pursuing identification through pain. An amateurish authenticity, shining out from an imitation of exemplary art, is the artistic program that, openly formulated and fulfilled by Ugrešić, was indirectly inherited and developed by Tokarczuk and Gospodinov, bringing them world audiences and awards. At the end, the text reflects on why a program that proved so successful with Tokarczuk and Gospodinov did not make Ugrešić the literary star and cult writer she deserves to be.
FANTASTIC ELEMENTS IN THE NARRATION OF PAST TRAUMA IN LISA WEEDA’S NOVEL ALEKSANDRA
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025) Zhygun, Snizhana
The article analyzes the narrative of past trauma in Lisa Weeda's novel Alexandra as a third-generation trauma narrative. The aim of the study is to assess the role of the fantastic elements in the narrative strategy of the author. Lisa, the protagonist and narrator, seeks to discover the history of her relatives, the Krasnov family, but the sources she needs are remote in time and separated in space. Therefore, the novel creates an imaginary chronotope, the Palace of the Lost Don Cossack, where Lisa meets the dead, and imaginary narrators, the deer, symbols of the Don Cossacks. In this way, the author fills in the gaps in the information concerning the experience of the traumatized generation and comprehends the impact of her ancestors’ experience on the present of her contemporaries. The fantastic elements contribute to the realization of the narrative as a dialog between generations and turn the neglected history of the Ostarbeiters into an emotionally accessible one. The knowledge that Lisa recovers from obscurity helps her understand the first phase of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 as a return to the arbitrariness of the Soviet dictatorship which has not been condemned for its crimes because it has silenced its victims.
FRANKENSTEIN AND POWER DYNAMICS: FROM TEXT TO CONTEXT
(Plovdiv University Press “Paisii Hilendarski”, 2024-04-21) Kostadinova, Vitana
This paper traces aspects of the dynamic power hierarchies in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and in Richard Brinsley Peake’s stage adaptation Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein (1823). It close-reads these two as interpretations of Satan challenging the omnipotence of the Maker and touches upon the Victorian burlesque Frankenstein, or the Model Man (1849), which features education as a civilizational tool. The discussion then moves to the realm of newspaper publications in the nineteenth century that make use of the Frankenstein metaphor. The power dynamics between the creator and the creation getting out of control may be wavering but monstrosity soldiers on. In the final instance, a recent tendency in the Bulgarian political discourse of inscribing the speaker into the inherent tension produced by the power hierarchies demonstrates that different contexts bend the metaphor in different ways.
IMPRESSIONS OF ISTANBUL BY DR. TODOR YANKOV – THE FIRST BULGARIAN TRAVELLER TO THE IMPERIAL CAPITAL
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025) Mevsim, Hüseyin
Regardless of whether it is called Constantinople, Istanbul or Tsarigrad, the global city on the Bosphorus has always occupied an important place in Bulgarian political and spiritual history. The first travelogue in Bulgarian literature about this city appeared in the pages of a magazine only at the end of the 19th century, and very little is known about its author, Dr. Todor Yankov, today. This paper attempts to understand the reasons for the late appearance of the first travelogue; it examines three works – by Petko Slaveykov, Ivan Bogorov and Dimitar Mollov – about Istanbul, which may be taken to function as preludes to Impressions of Istanbul. The research offers a biographical and creative portrait of the educationalist, politician, publicist and writer Todor Yankov while outlining the compositional features of his travelogue about the imperial capital. The author of the travelogue was a representative of the first post-independence generation, which also determines his different attitude towards both the capital of the Ottoman Empire and the Bulgarian cultural and historical heritage in it; he carries the consciousness of a Bulgarian European pushed away from the narrow dimensions of the strictly domestic.
LITERATURE, POWER AND IMAGINATION: THE QUEST FOR DYSTOPIA IN THE BULGARIAN NOVEL OF THE 21st CENTURY
(Plovdiv University Press “Paisii Hilendarski”, 2024-04-21) Kirova, Milena
The study opens with the question: Why wasn't there a powerful wave of satire in Bulgarian literature in the first two decades of the 21st century, even though the situation of the Transition closely resembled the situation that spawned the satire of Ivan Vazov, Aleko Konstantinov and Stoyan Mikhailovsky a hundred years earlier? The answer to this question is found in the compensatory emergence and rapid rise of a genre that had been virtually absent: the dystopian novel. This article traces the process in which two dozen dystopian works were published in twelve years; their number helps defining an already remarkable phenomenon in Bulgarian literary history. Among the authors discussed are famous writers such as Georgi Gospodinov, Zahari Karabashliev, Emilia Dvoryanova, Vasil Georgiev, Vladislav Todorov, Georgi Tenev... The article concludes with a synthesis of the genre specificity and thematic diversity of Bulgarian dystopian literature of the early 21st century.
LONGING FOR PERSONALITIES – THE TESTAMENT OF BORIS YOTSOV
(Plovdiv University Press "Paisii Hilendarski", 2024) Damyanova, Rumyana
The text follows Boris Yotsov's idea of the personalities who should lead the Bulgarian people forward – the optimistic forecast for the right choice and the explanation of the failures on the historical path that are due to wrong choices. In its aim to present the main moments of the scholar's life and creative destiny, the text is based on aspects of Boris Yotsov's article “Longing for personalities”.
MOSAIC OF FAMOUS CONTEMPORARY NOVELS AND THE HEART IN THE CARDBOARD BOX – CO-AUTHORSHIP PRACTICES, CREATIVE INFLUENCES
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025) Georgieva, Vanya
The paper explores an approach to understanding the contribution of A Mosaic of Famous Contemporary Novels” (1909 – 1948) to Bulgarian culture and literature. Special attention is paid to the collaborative translations included in the series. The co-authoring practices illustrated by the narratives chosen have had an influence on the creation of the collective work of Svetoslav Minkov and Konstantin Konstantinov. The novel The Heart in the Cardboard Box (1933) is examined in the light of intertextuality, translation between different cultures, the relations between textual reality and the reality beyond the text.
NARRATIVES ABOUT MIGRATION FROM BULGARIA AFTER 1944
(Plovdiv University Press "Paisii Hilendarski", 2024) Endreva, Maria
Based on the concept of loyalty by A. Hirschman, the text tries to define and schematically to analyze the various narratives about emigration from Bulgaria after 1944. The thesis is that socialism fails to build loyal citizens, which leads to a mass migration from the country after 1989. In the period up to 1989, the official strategy of power to demonize the West and those who fled to it and the heroization of the defenders of socialism, as well as the subversive narrative of free and wealthy society, which becomes a object of desires, are examined. After the Cold war, the narrative of the idealization of the West manifested two aspects: cultural and economic, and motivated millions of people to leave the country. A relatively underdeveloped discourse on the silence of negative experiences abroad is also examined.
OBSERVATIONS ON BULGARIAN SURNAMES ARISING FROM TURKISH LOANWORDS MEANING PROFESSION OR CRAFT
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025) Kartalova, Mariyana
The article examines the Bulgarian surnames, which are based on Turkish loanwords that have established themselves in the Bulgarian language. It should be noted that the original source of these Turkish loanwords may be a lexeme of Arabic or Persian origin. The empirical material is limited to those surnames that are motivated by a lexeme with the semantics of profession or craft. Bulgarian surnames from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century have been extracted. When studying the target group of anthroponyms, both possible linguistic relations and those of an extralinguistic nature are considered. The field of research includes synonymous relations between anthroponymic units, the formation of thematic circle, or the so-called “semantic sockets”. When presenting the synonymous relations between surnames motivated by a Turkish loanword and those with a domestic basis, it is not always easy to establish which form arose first (cf. Dyulgerovand Zidarov, Chobanovand Ovcharov, Kuyumdzhiev and Zlatarov, Domuschiev and Svinarov, etc.). The examples, as will be clear from the presentation of this research, are indicative of the entry of Turkish vocabulary into the Bulgarian language, which also affects the surname system of the Bulgarians. This leads to the parallel existence in our language of surnames inspired by lexemes of different origins.
ON THE INTERACTION BETWEEN THE LEXICAL MEANING OF THE RUSSIAN VERB TANCEVAТ’ AND VERBAL PREFIXES WITH SPATIAL MEANING
(Plovdiv University Press "Paisii Hilendarski", 2024) Slavkova, Svetlana; Zangoli, Giulia
This paper analyses the prefixal encoding of spatial orientation in one of the few Russian ʿstrongʾ verbs of manner of motion, i. e. the verb tancevat’ (to dance). Our study relies primarily on the conceptual framework presented in the works of V. A. Plungyan (Плунгян / Plungyan 2002; 2011). Following the approach adopted by the author regarding verbs specializing in expressing only the manner of motion (in the author’s terminology, “strong verbs of manner of motion”), we focus our attention on the behavior of the verb tancevat’ (to dance) and on its prefixed forms in order to determine which ʿlatentʾ components of its semantics are activated when prefixed. Attention is paid as well to the interaction between the spatial meaning of verbal prefixes and the lexical meaning of the verb tancevat’ (to dance). Except for a few cases the material we analyse is taken from the Russian National Corpus. Exam-ples are intentionally given with a broader context in order to provide a more detailed analysis of prefixed forms of the verb tancevat’ in their context of use.
PAUL McCARTNEY'S SONG LYRICS: LITERARY AUTO-REFLEXIVITY
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025) Zahova, Kalina
The paper presents certain contemporary observations by Paul McCartney on his own song lyrics written during his creative periods with The Beatles, Wings, as a solo artist, and in collaboration with other artists. The article traces the relations between specificity and openness of the interpretation, as well as the deliberate and spontaneously originated polysemy. Paul McCartney's auto-reflexivity is examined not only as a form of autobiographicality, which it inevitably is, but also as a manifestation of various aspects of literariness.
POISONOUS BOOKS
(Plovdiv University Press "Paisii Hilendarski", 2024) Freise, Matthias
Books can be poisonous in a literal, metaphorical, metonymical or symbolic sense. Literally, for protection; metonymically, in fiction, for killing; metaphorically, in metalepsis, as revealing reality as being fictitious; symbolically, as a danger to readers. The article examines examples of all four possibilities. Often metaphor, metonymy and symbols are used to convey a metapoetic message about the relationship between fiction and reality, about the political, social or psychological power of literature, about literature as temptation or a narcotic, or about the ambivalence of a literary message, and thus fundamentally different modes of reading. In particular, the article argues that David Damrosch’s reading in What is World Literature? of Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, which he declares to be poisoned by Serbian nationalism, is subverted by the book itself which differentiates a poisonous from a non-poisonous copy of itself, meaning alternative modes of reading.
POLITICAL FORNICATION AND THE NATIONAL IDEAL: THE IMAGE OF THE UNION
(Plovdiv University Press, 2025) Gyulemerova, Velika
The article analyzes Chardafon the Great. A Biographical Sketch in Profile, examining the ideological image of the homeland and different perceptions of the Unification. The emphasis is on the opposition between Zahari Stoyanov and Ivan Vazov which affected their different perceptions of the act of Unification. While for Vazov the heroes of this period are compromised, for Stoyanov they embody a new form of dignity. This difference in points of view is of crucial significance to understanding different ideological models in Bulgarian literature. The article also emphasizes the way in which patriarchal morality and traditional values are reinterpreted in the text. The main focus is the reversal of the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son – instead of condemnation, political “fornication“ is shown as adaptability. Chardafon the Great offers an alternative historical perspective, in which traditional notions of power, homeland and political loyalty are questioned. Zahari Stoyanov does not simply tell the biography of a hero, but creates a new model of national identity, in which imperfection and humor play a central role. The text affirms the Unification as an act of national self-affirmation, in which the people take their destiny into their own hands, despite the lack of “blessing“ from the Great Powers.

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