ЗА ЕДНА ТЕНДЕНЦИЯ В СЛОВОРЕДА В ЧАСТНИТЕ ВЪПРОСИ В СЪВРЕМЕННИЯ БЪЛГАРСКИ ЕЗИК / ON A TENDENCY IN THE WORD ORDER OF CONTENT QUESTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN

Abstract

The word order in content questions in Bulgarian is largely determined by the information structure of the sentence, whereby the wh-word most commonly assumes the position immediately preceding the verb and the subject is located after the verb. In recent years the author believes to have observed a growth in the frequency of content questions in which the subject precedes the verb, as is usual in declarative sentences. If this is the case, it may be due to the waxing influence of English, where an auxiliary verb usually precedes the subject in content questions (inversion), but the main verb retains its place after the subject. A study was conducted on a provisional corpus of 138 thousand content questions beginning with an initial adverbial wh-word защо ‘why’, как ‘how’, кога ‘when’ (докога ‘until when’, откога ‘since when’) or къде ‘where’ (докъде ‘up to where’, закъде ‘due where’, накъде ‘whither’, откъде ‘whence’) extracted from original Bulgarian as well as translated texts, mostly fiction. The material shows a tangible correlation between the source language of the translated texts and the frequency of inversion in content questions: it is most common in translations from Romanian and much rarer in translations from Turkish, with the original Bulgarian texts occupying a middle position. In the translations from English, which prevail in the corpus in terms of number, the frequency of questions without inversion increases over time. This supports the hypothesis about the influence of English on Bulgarian with respect to the word order in content ques-tions. Keywords: Bulgarian, interrogative sentences, word order