2025/10/30 by Svetla Koeva · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics #Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · pdf · doi:10.37708/ezs.swu.bg.v23i3.2
openalex created_date 2025/10/30 · openalex publication_date 2025/10/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
The article presents the categorisation of Bulgarian verbs into situation types: States, activities, accomplishments, achievements. Based on the grammatical category of the verb aspect in Bulgarian, a classification scheme was developed to categorise verbs into different situation types. In some cases in Bulgarian, not only the grammatical verb aspect but also the type of derivation is an indicator of the respective situation type, so that several subgroups of verbs have been formed. In general, states and activities are imperfective verbs, while accomplishments and achievements are perfective verbs, and the difference lies in the lexical meaning of the verbs. For some groups the categorisation into a situation type is unambiguous, for others two or three options have to be disambiguated by the context. Verbs that realise their aspectual meaning in context can be defined as aspectless insofar as they can express either activity or accomplishment, or activity or achievement, depending on their lexical meaning and contextual realisation. The ambiguous cases have led us to consider some verbs from the groups of so-called secondary imperfective verbs and bi-aspectual verbs as lexically aspectless verbs that realise their aspect compositionally. Consequently, some of the Bulgarian verbs (the secondary imperfective and the bi-aspectual verbs) can be analysed in a similar way as the English verbs.