Inalienable possession in French and in Bulgarian

Abstract

In this paper I try to find the ways of expression of Inalienable possession (IA) in Bulgarian, in comparison with French. I discuss the morphology and the interpretation of the determiners of these two languages, likely to function as A-bound morphemes according to Guéron’s (1985, 2005) binding hypothesis concerning the IA construal, based on the presence of phi-features on the determiners. I use an additional condition for a determiner to be A-bound (which comes from Vergnaud & Zubizarreta 1992), namely the possibility for a determiner to have expletive uses. I claim that only the French definite article and the Bulgarian null determiner are subject to binding, the Bulgarian definite article being excluded due to its strong referential power.