The verbal expression of events of change in Bulgarian

Abstract

The paper explores the verbal expression of events of change in Bulgarian, a Slavic language with a uniquely complex verbal system involving triplets of imperfective, perfective and secondary imperfective verbs and aspectual tenses like Aorist and Imperfect. It starts from the observation that English predicates involving events of change generally correspond to Bulgarian triplets of lexically related but aspectually differentiated verbs. It addresses this asymmetry by investigating the properties of the events in the denotation of the triplet members in terms of Rothstein’s (2004) aspectual features [±stage] and [±change]. The paper provides evidence for a systematic mapping between the aspectual properties of the triplet members and Rothstein’s event types and proposes an analysis of the event structure of the triplet members. The findings support both the assumption of independent event types denoted by verbal predicates and the notion of telicity as a VP-level phenomenon, and provide evidence for a strategy of expressing aspectual distinctions in which aspectual properties are not directly tied to the roots of verbal predicates but are partly morphologically and partly lexically encoded.