A DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE ON SUFFIX DERIVATION OF NOUNS IN THE MODERN BULGARIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The paper outlines the dynamics and competition of suffixes for the formation of one-stem and two-stem nouns (nomina agentis, nomina actoris, nomina abstracta, nomina essendi, nomina loci) in the Old Bulgarian, Middle Bulgarian and Modern Bulgarian period in the development of the modern Bulgarian written language. The Old Bulgarian written canon (the accessible Preslav and Ohrid manuscripts from 10-12 c.), a wide range of manuscripts and lexical indices of manuscripts from 13-15 c. (some of them not studied until now), late Renaissance lexicographic studies from 18 c. (mostly the excerpted lexical data in Nayden Gerov’s Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language, v. I-VI, etc.) and studies of the synchronic Bulgarian lexis (Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language 1-15 volumes, etc.) have been put to use for the purposes of the analysis.The paper studies the productive/bound and non-productive/unbound suffix morphemes of deverbatives, denominatives and deadjectival nouns in the different historical periods and outlines their diachronic qualitative tendencies. It seeks to establish the reasons for the gradual limiting of suffix derivation as a word-formation process. These include among others the transformation of the Bulgarian language from a synthetic into an analytic one; the perception of some affixes as uneuphonic or as borrowed; the progressively limited transfer of foreign derivational models (through morpheme-to-morpheme translation from Greek in the Middle Ages or through borrowing of Russian affixes in the Renaissance, as well as their higher frequency since the 1940s); the tendency for economy of derivational synonymy; the interrelation of suffix derivatives and the genre and stylistic features of the text. The paper enumerates the active inherited and newly created derivational formants-suffixes in the Bulgarian language, while the researcher strives not to illustrate the full list of derivational suffixes in modern Bulgarian, which have already been studied, but rather to elucidate the qualitative fluctuations and the realization of suffixes. The formants have been inspected from a semasiological point of view as well — as a resource for the production of semantic doublets. Thus, the paper adds a new perspective to the kaleidoscope of Bulgarian historical morphology.