2026/07/03 by Dimitar Georgiev · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Literature, Language, and Rhetoric Studies #Religious, Philosophical, and Educational Studies #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · pdf · doi:10.37708/ezs.swu.bg.v24i2.4
openalex publication_date 2026/07/03 · openalex created_date 2026/07/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
The article examines specific cases of complex sentences with copulative predication, in which the subordinate clauses cannot be interpreted as substitutes in subject position. The discussion focuses on particular features of impersonal and subjectless structures with the verb to be in contemporary Bulgarian, as well as on the subordinate clauses within these complex sentences. Attention is directed to several sentence models where the main clauses are impersonal, while the subordinate clauses are functionally interpreted within the framework of the Bulgarian syntactic tradition. The first structural model involves a headword associated with the extralinguistic category of time, together with the verb to be. The subordinate clauses are interpreted as modifiers of the head constituent, based on the syntactic properties of the noun vreme and the specific features of the copulative verb. The second part of the article presents impersonal sentences expressing emotional states, in which pronominal clitics in the accusative and in the dative function as obligatory structural elements. The article describes the specifics of these constructions as main clauses and how they determine the interpretation of subordinate clauses. Alongside the systematic presentation of various impersonal structures, the article raises several theoretical issues related to the nature of null-subject constructions, the limits of the formal approach and formal descriptions of linguistic structures, as well as the leading role of the semantics of the governing constituents in determining possible extensions.