Definiteness in the Bulgarian Dialects
Olga M. Mladenova
University of Calgary
Leaning on the comparison between two varieties of Bulgarian (Modern
Standard Bulgarian as represented by my competence as a native speaker
of Bulgarian and a selection of damascenes of the seventeenth, eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries), I have constructed a model of the evolution
of definiteness in Bulgarian. Definiteness is approached semiotically from
the perspective of the relationship of its two aspects: expression (mainly
but not exclusively nominal structure) and content. The proposed default
inheritance model of the content of definiteness has the following levels
listed in an order of diminishing scope: pragmatic (familiar vs. novel
in the universe of discourse), referential-semantic (from typifying generics
to quantitative generics to encompassing definite sets or, alternatively,
distributive singulars to individuative definite sets to unique referents
to indefinites to non-specifics and back to typifying generics), lexical-morphological
(application of the upper-level values to word classes or individual words)
and semantic-syntactic (application of the upper-level values to sentence
components). The highest level of the model determines the features of
a given entity unless exceptional values have been encoded for it on a
lower level. In the framework of this model the damascene language was
connected to Modern Standard Bulgarian through eight consecutive processes
that map the path of expansion of the definite article and the delimitation
of denotational segments outside the sphere of action of the definite article.
My goal in this paper is to check the validity of the model against a broader
corpus of data that includes regional variation and which makes it possible
to evaluate the constructed model of definiteness from a dialectological
angle. In view of the data amassed in Bulgarian dialectology in decades
of research, among the relevant issues are the following: the impact of
the four grammatical categories (case, animacy, gender and number), identified
previously as correlated with definiteness, on the choice of definite article;
the position of my diachronic model of definiteness in regard to the opposition
between the two systems of articulation known to Bulgarian dialects (triple
vs. single articulation) and the relation of the definite article
to the long-form adjectives that were in use in the pre-modern stages of
Bulgarian.