Bulgarian Language Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The monograph presents a multi-faceted contrastive survey of the syntactic systems of Bulgarian and Russian. This presentation makes available a number of practical and theoretical findings in Bulgarian, a language “classical and exotic” at the same time, according to an apt remark of S. Ivanchev. This language, purely Slavic in its origin, has developed over its history some features radically differentiating it from many Slavic languages, including Russian. Part of those are typically Balkanic, while the others are their derivatives or are resulting from an independent language development. Main specific features of Bulgarian that have shaped the sentence structure in this language are, among others: a) the loss of nominal declension, b) the morphologisation of definiteness, c) the loss of the infinitive and the development of the DA construction, d) the loss of past adverbial participles and the transformation of the system of participles, accompanied by the activisation of predicative attributes, e) Null Subject structures, f) the preservation of an evolved clitic system, etc. These features gave rise to the formation of essential syntactic peculiarities of Bulgarian in contrast with Russian, such as: redistribution of types of subordinate syntactic relations (the propagation of the adjoining relation); specific means of the semantic subject eviction; specific structures of impersonal sentences; the expansion of the DA construction with imperatives, interrogatives and complex sentences (including the positions filled in Russian by the conditional mood); specific structures of complex sentences with the DA element (regular splitting of compound conjunctions, restrictions on the choice of tenses); the doubling of the object at the level of the simple and complex sentences; specific word order and peculiarities of the movement of sentential and group clitics, etc.
The system of Bulgarian syntax is described in a number of aspects (“sentence parts” analysis, referential, communicative, communicative functional aspects) to form an integral view of the object of the study. 1) Conventional “sentence parts” analysis has been enriched with state of the art insights of the modern linguistic theory. Each partition in the traditional classifications of the simple and complex sentence is supplemented with substantial contrastive observations. In an outline of the features of the Bulgarian syntactic system contrasted with the Russian syntax, the focus is given to the phenomena having a general typological importance. Translation equivalents are widely used not only as the basis of confrontation between the two languages, but also as a guidance for the linguists lacking the knowledge of Bulgarian. A similar purpose is assigned to morphological (or other, where appropriate) comments and notes dispersed in the text as sources of additional information on the discussed phenomena. The study is amply supported with the data from parallel Bulgarian-Russian and Russian-Bulgarian corpora, as well as from the National Corpora of Bulgarian and Russian. 2) An important part of the study is dedicated to the referential aspect of the Bulgarian sentence. This section presents the article system of Bulgarian, outlining the correspondences between article markers and referential statuses of noun phrases, as well as existing dependencies between reference/article markers and verbal categories. 3) The study describes the inventory of the main communicative semantic features in Bulgarian, such as theme, rheme, contrast, emphasis, etc. The peculiarity of Bulgarian in developing linear intonation shifts is revealed, which is due to the relatively fixed word order and flat intonation as compared to Russian. Another point of discussion is the difference between Bulgarian and Russian in realising specific communicative strategies of the speaker, arising from the increased functional load of articles in expressing communicative features when the linear intonation variation is restricted. 4) Communicative functional aspect is brought into the forefront in the description of the semantic subject eviction (passive, subject impersonal, indeterminate finite and participial impersonal constructions); in the analysis of the role of descriptive predicates in passive, decausative, affective impersonal constructions; in the treatment of constructions with the nominalisation, attributisation, adverbialisation of the verbal component of descriptive predicates, etc. 5) The study outlines the principles of the word order in the Bulgarian sentence, as well as the range of issues associated with the Bulgarian clitics. 6) The difference between the Bulgarian and Russian punctuation systems is clearly exposed. The revealed distinctions are shown to be mainly related to the deviations from the syntactic principle of punctuation underlying many rules in Bulgarian. Presently the Bulgarian system is largely eclectic, and in future it is likely to continue drifting towards the French-like systems..
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