OBSERVATION ON A CERTAIN GRAMMATICAL HOMONYMY IN BULGARIAN AND EXERCISES TO OVERCOME THE MISTAKES IT CAUSES IN FOREIGN STUDENTS’ SPEECH

Abstract

Developing communicative competence is a main objective in learning Bulgarian as a foreign language. There are two teaching aims in the process, a general one (everyday usage) and special one (academic and professional communication). Bulgarian name system, nouns, adjectives and numerals in particular, proves to be a source of numerous mistakes made by foreigners during their language education. There are certain forms and structures in the morphological system of Bulgarian which foreign students find really hard to acquire. These are of great interest in the light of the repair theory, so that an approach to rectify the mistakes is developed. The present article’s purpose is to examine a grammatical homonymy of word forms with identical inflection “a” with nouns, adjectives and ordinal numbers. Homonymous affixes –а (улица, главна улица, три стола, на стола, трета улица) have entirely different meanings. With nouns, adjectives and ordinal numbers ‘a’’ is an indication for singular feminine, whereas with the masculine it indicates numerical form or definiteness – definite article. This grammatical homonymy induces objectively lexical-grammatical errors due to overgeneralization at the early stage of teaching Bulgarian to foreign students. These homonymous word forms recognition by the students is the basis for lexical-grammatical competence (main parameter, including lexical, morphological, syntactic and phonological and graphological knowledge). To achieve this competence we introduce targeted exercises in identifying and comparing homonymous affixes and their correct usage in sentence construction. According to the generally accepted concept of human cognitive activities, the core of learning is information processing rather than habitualization. Inasmuch as foreign language acquisition requires actively extracting rules from the language input, the knowledge of the presented grammatical homonymy is expected to be applied by students in order to achieve Bulgarian linguistic competence.