Papers of BAS

Abstracting / Indexing

Papers of BAS. Humanities and Social Sciences

Vol. 10, 2023, No. 1

Evidentiality in modern Bulgarian language

Krasimira Aleksova

Abstract. In the present study, we argue that the Bulgarian evidential system con­sists of four members: indicative, conclusive, renarrative, and dubitative. To achieve this objective, we analyze the meanings, forms and main uses of these four evidentials in modern Bulgarian, thereby supporting the notion that the Bulgarian evidential verb category is well-developed and rich in forms and applications. Throughout this work, we maintain the thesis that the grammaticalization of evidentiality in modern Bulgarian is not a completed process due to two main reasons: the presence of three types of negative forms for the future tenses and the penetrability observed in all composite evidential forms.

Keywords: evidentiality, indicative, renarrative, conclusive, dubitative, modern Bulgarian language