Adnominal l-Participles in Early Modern Bulgarian

Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv – Bulgaria Research Papers, 2017

The paper presents a contrastive analysis of the English Past Participle and the Bulgarian Past Passive Participle in terms of their etymology, usages and functional equivalence. It touches upon the process of grammaticalisation of the linguistic units in both languages and briefly describes their most frequent usages. The analysis also includes a corpus of examples excerpted from the Bulgarian National Corpus (BulNC) and examines translation equivalents in order to elaborate on the differences and similarities of these linguistic units.

Proglas, 2022

Bulgarian linguistic publications describe (non)witnessing of the perfect in different and controversial terms. Many do not tackle the issue, some claim that the perfect is neutral as to witnessing. Prevalent is the view that three major separate values, grammaticalized, underlie the sam+l (i.e., be+past active participle) forms: perfect, inferential, renarrative. But if these are three homonymous grammemes and the perfect is neutral as to witnessing, it will turn out that perfects counter inferentials and renarratives with this specific property absent in the latter two-because they are strictly nonwitnessed. Such a thesis would be defective, however, because thirdperson present perfect forms, much more frequent, are nonwitnessed, with no exception at all. They are nonwitnessed also when formed from imperfect participles. Nonthirdperson perfect forms are subject to further study. But the status of thirdperson perfect forms as nonwitnessed must be incorporated into Bulgarian grammars, because the absence of this major characteristic discredits them.

E. Tarpomanova. Aspectual and temporal characteristics of the past active participles in Bulgarian -a corpus-based study. - Proceedings ot CLIB 2018., 2018

The paper presents a corpus-based study of the past active participles in Bulgarian with respect of their aspectual and temporal characteristics. As this type of participles combine two morphological markers, a special attention is paid on their interaction in different tenses, moods and evidentials. The source of language material used for the study is the Bulgarian National Corpus. The paper is organized in terms of morphological oppositions, aspectual and temporal, analyzing the functions of the participles in compound verbal forms.

Advances in formal Slavic linguistics 2022, 2025

We focus on nominalisations seemingly derived from l-participles, illustrated by lec-nominalisations in Slovenian, in order to establish the nature and position of the l-morpheme as well as the structure of these nominalisations in general. Our research is situated in the current debates on whether the item l in l-participles and l-nominalisations is the same morpheme or two different morphemes, and if the former, whether l-nominalisations are derived from l-participles. We argue that the l-morpheme is a root in both, but also show that it is not the case that lecnominalisations contain l-participles. The lec-nominalisations are argued to contain a smaller structure than the corresponding l-participle, which is also reflected in the set of theme vowels possible in these nominalisations.

PhD Thesis, University of Oxford, 2023

This thesis investigates the semantic and pragmatic properties of Early Slavic participle constructions (conjunct participles and dative absolutes) to understand the principles motivating their selection over one another and over their main finite competitor (jegda-clauses). The issue is tackled by adopting two broadly different approaches, which inform the division of the thesis into two parts. The first part of the thesis uses detailed linguistic annotation on Early Slavic corpora at the morphosyntactic, dependency, information-structural, and lexical levels to obtain indirect evidence for different potential functions of participle clauses and their main finite competitor. The goal of this part of the thesis is to understand the roles of compositionality and default discourse reasoning as explanations for the distribution of participle constructions and jegda-clauses in the Early Slavic corpus. The investigation shows that the competition between conjunct participles, absolute constructions, and jegda-clauses occurs at the level of discourse organization, where the main determining factor in their distribution is the distinction between background and foreground content of an (elementary or complex) discourse unit. The analysis also shows that the major common denominator between the three constructions is that all of them can function as frame-setting devices (i.e. background clauses), albeit to very different extents. In fact, conjunct participles are more typically associated with the foreground constituent of a discourse unit, whereas dative absolutes and jegda-clauses are typically associated with the background content. The second part of the thesis uses massively parallel data, including Old Church Slavonic and Ancient Greek, and analyses typological variation in how languages express the semantic space of English when, whose scope encompasses that of Early Slavic participle constructions and jegda-clauses. To do so, probabilistic semantic maps are generated and statistical methods (including Kriging, Gaussian Mixture Modelling, precision and recall analysis) are used to induce cross-linguistically salient dimensions from the parallel corpus and to study conceptual variation within the semantic space of the hypothetical concept when. Clear typological correspondences and differences with Early Slavic from linguistic phenomena in other languages are then exploited to corroborate and refine observations made on the core semantic-pragmatic properties of participle constructions and jegda-clauses on the basis of annotated Early Slavic data. The analysis shows that 'null’ constructions (juxtaposed clauses such as participles and converbs, or independent clauses) consistently cluster in particular regions of the semantic map cross-linguistically, which clearly indicates that participle clauses are not equally viable as alternatives to any use of when, but carry particular meanings that make them less suitable for some of its functions. The investigation helped identify genealogically and areally unrelated languages that seem typologically very similar to Old Church Slavonic in the way they divide the semantic space of when between overtly subordinated and 'null’ constructions. Comparison with these languages reveals great similarities between the functions of Early Slavic participle constructions and of linguistic phenomena in some of these languages (particularly clause chaining, bridging, insubordination, and switch reference). Crucially, new clear correspondences are found between these phenomena and 'non-canonical’ usages of participle constructions (i.e. coreferential dative absolutes, syntactically independent absolutes and conjunct participles, and participle constructions with no apparent matrix clause), which had often been written off as ‘aberrations’ by previous literature on Early Slavic.