Bulgarian grammar by Ruselina Nicolova

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bulgarian grammar by Ruselina Nicolova Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan Ruselina Nicolova. Bulgarian grammar. Berlin Frank and Timme GmbH, 2017. 714 pp. This new Bulgarian grammar is a welcome addition to the field of Slavic linguistics. Its author, Ruselina Nicolova, is a distinguished scholar who has been at the forefront of Bulgarian linguistics for many years. The book, a result of her decades long pedagogical and scholarly work, presents a thorough account of Bulgarian morphology, offering an excellent summary of the existing literature in Bulgarian and advancing new analyses of debated issues, such as definiteness and evidentiality. Phonology and syntax are not represented in the book apart from a few short sections on sound changes and morphophonemic alternations and a brief description of the linear order of clitics. Rather, the author's goal is to offer a comprehensive examination of Bulgarian morphological categories. It is thus not surprising that the book is packed with data, which is both an advantage and a challenge to the reader. Making sense of the data could sometimes be problematic because the Bulgarian example and its English translation are not graphically separated from the rest of the text. Nevertheless, the author's choice to transliterate the examples using the Scientific Transliteration System of Cyrillic (with a couple of exceptions, such as ch instead of h for the Bulgarian х and â instead of ă for ъ) makes it more appealing to a wider linguistic community not necessarily familiar with the Cyrillic script. The book draws primarily on publications in Bulgarian and Russian, referencing some rare publications that are typically not available to wider audiences. This approach sets the book apart from previous grammars and provides non-Bulgarian-speaking scholars with access to the wealth of literature in that language. In parallel to earlier Bulgarian grammars, the book is intended to serve as a reference source but, unlike them, it cannot be used as a self-study course for learning Bulgarian. The grammars by Hauge (1999), Alexander (2001), and Leafgren (2011) aimed to offer theoretical but also practical information to learners of Bulgarian who also want to get familiar with the language structure. Such goals prompted treatments of the material that differ from Nicolova's book in scope and coverage of the scholarly literature. For example, Hauge's short grammar of contemporary Bulgarian offers a good and accessible description of the language with a focus on morphology and syntax. [End Page 337] However, as the title of Hauge's grammar suggests, his depth of discussion and the number of phenomena treated in his book are on a smaller scale. Alexander's Intensive Bulgarian (2001) has a double function: it is a textbook and a reference grammar that provides useful linguistic information and language data for students and linguists alike. The advantage of her approach is in the book's practical application and the choice of material. Alexander also offers some theoretical insights about clitic ordering rules and revisits the Bulgarian system of tense, mood, and aspect, proposing the concept of a "generalized past". Leafgren's short but informative grammatical sketch of contemporary Bulgarian (2011) summarizes key facts about Bulgarian morphosyntax and provides a brief sociolinguistic discussion of contemporary usage. Scatton's reference grammar (1984) is the only one that, similarly to Nicolova's book, intends to be a theoretically based resource for linguists and advanced students. It offers structural description and analysis of phonology and morphology and functional treatment of syntax. This was the first complete grammar of Bulgarian written in English in the generative tradition, and as such became a valuable resource for linguists who were interested both in the language and the formal approach to grammar. Nicolova adopts a functional framework with a focus on the description, empirical generalization, and categorization of the morphological data. This approach is reflected in the organization of the book in sections that discuss general characteristics of the parts of speech and subsections featuring analysis of grammatical categories (gender, number, mood, and others). For example, the reader will find a discussion of grammatical gender and number in the section on nouns, while tense, aspect, and mood are included in the section on verbs. Such an organizational principle makes the book easy to follow...