New Political Phraseology in Bulgarian Public Speech

This text explores the potential for updating the phraseological fund of the Bulgarian language in the Bulgarian public discourse and examines the influence of different types of updates on the specifics of the functioning of the given phraseological units in public speech. The most visible updates are those that clearly introduce new elements into the meaning of the original sustained phrase, but at the same time retain the obvious connection to the original language unit. Phraseological units, which are generally distinguished by semantic indivisibility, stability of their lexical composition, invariable structure, imagery, emotionality and expressiveness, are subject to dynamic changes occurring in Bulgarian language in recent years. We direct our interest to stable expressions, in the composition of which a new component appears as a manifestation of lexical dynamics, which replaces an already established one, or an additional element appears in the structure of a phraseology, i.e. our attention will be directed mainly to the so-called lexical updates of the phraseological fund. In the text, we trace the change (structural and semantic) in a number of phraseological units in the Bulgarian language, in which the entry of the lexical component kopeyka is observed. The excerpted material is from two corpora – CLASSLA-web.bg (Bulgarian web) and the corpus of parliamentary speech ParlaMint corpus: https://www.clarin.si/ske/#concordance. The examples extracted from the corpora are relevant for tracking the changes we are interested in in the phraseological fund of the modern Bulgarian language.