... In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fiction's ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself -- or even about nothing at all -- postmodernist fiction in McHale's construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those hardy literary perennials, Love and Death. itself in our critical and theoretical discourses. We have a,--- postmodern architecture, a postmodern dance, perhaps even a postmodern philosophy and a postmodern condition. But do we have a postmodernist fiction? Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version capacious enough to include North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction, to name but a few of its forms. The common denominator is postmodernist fiction's ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Exploiting various theoretical approaches to literary ontology - those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, Hrushovski and others - and ranging widely over contemporary world literature, McHale assembles a comprehensive repertoire of postmodernist fiction's strategies of world-making and -unmaking. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself or even about nothing at all, postmodernist fiction in McHale's construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those hardy literary perennials, Love and Death. "This is one of the most lively and lucid studies of contemporary fiction around. Whether or not you agree with his provocative definition of the postmodern, McHale's argument is always engaging, bold, and forceful.
Linda Hutcheon
В систематичен ред. Книги, статии и рецензии. 339 названия, Съдържа и списък на прегледаните източници.
The article is a contribution to the theory and practice of teaching German phonetics to Bulgarian learners. It focuses on German labialized front vowels which have no equivalents in Bulgarian. The study is carried out in two directions: (a) a contrastive analysis of German labialized front vowels and Bulgarian vowel phonemes, aimed at predicting possible pronunciation errors, and (b) a diagnosis of errors in the production of German labialized front vowels made by Bulgarian advanced learners.
Some semantic factors affecting the concrete realization in English and Bulgarian of the comparison operator are dwelt upon. The categorial meaning of this operator is defined and its direct dependence on the ‘GRADABLE’ feature of the compared items is thrown into relief. It is noteworthy that this feature may be either inherent in the lexical items or assigned secondarily. It is also argued that the direction of the comparison should follow that of meaning inclusion in the hierarchy. According to the proposition status a distinction is drawn between ‘general’ and ‘partial’ comparison. Cases in which the operator affects the modal characteristics of the sentence are considered as well. In conclusion the choice of an exponent has been found to be directly related to the items governed by the comparison operator.
This is a contrastive study of the distributive and attenuative Aktionsart (mode of action), based on data from Modern Ukrainian and Bulgarian. The following issues are considered: productivity of the Aktionsart (approximate number of lexemes); formal diversity of the exponents (number and relative productivity of the respective word-formative markers in the two languages); distribution of each formal marker, i. e. characterization of the source verbs in terms of lexical semantics, Aktionsart, aspect, in/transitivity; possibility for the formal marker (prefix) to occur as a second to the root affix; stylistic colouring of the derivative verbs; relationship between each Aktionsart and the perfective/imperfective opposition and hence, the position of the respective Aktionsart in the aspectual system of the language.
The article considers some of the major correspondences in the phonological systems of Mod46 ern Bulgarian and Japanese. Special attention has been given to the common descriptive framework as a prerequisite for a reliable contrastive analysis. The traditional definition in Japanese linguistics of the syllable as an unanalysable unit is also discussed.
This is a data-based study of the native speech production of Russians residing in Bulgaria, which reveals disturbed communicative competence. It is suggested that systematic investigations of this kind could throw some light on the mechanisms of language contact and language change (including diachrony). Such studies can also contribute to the theory of contrastive analysis of Bulgarian with other languages. Finally, certain inferences could be made concerning language teaching.
The purpose of the article is to relate vowel duration as an acoustic parameter to rhythm as a language-specific feature of the phrase in English and Bulgarian. Analysis of variance and the HSD-test are used to establish significant differences between vowel durations in sets of sen49 tences. The results demonstrate that while the syntagmatic relation between stressed and unstressed vowels does not emerge clearly from the differences between them in duration, a 1:1 ratio is preserved between the total vowel durations of rhythmic feet in the same English phrase. In Bulgarian vowel durations contrast adjacent syllables as stressed and unstressed within the same rhythmic foot and work across rhythmic feet to arrange stressed syllables according to degrees of prominence. Different patterns for the rhythmic feet in English and Bulgarian emerge and a criterion for establishing the boundaries between feet in Bulgarian is suggested. English data also confirm extra-length of final vowel and shortest duration for [ə] as reported elsewhere.
The functional-semantic field of the conclusive (inferential) modality is analysed across Bulgarian and Byelorussian. The source language is Bulgarian in which this modality is grammaticized. It is expressed by the forms of the inferential mood (Modus Conclusivus). The author renders the full paradigm of the Conclusive as well as some non-grammatical means functioning at the periphery of the field. The most common Byelorussian inferential modificators are also given and their use is exemplified.
The class of the conditional clauses is not as uniform as other clause-adjunct classes, those of time or place, for example. It comprises a number of sub-types such as true conditionals, in which the fulfilment of the event in the apodosis is really dependent on the condition in the protasis, or conditionals only by form. The formally conditional sentences can in turn be further subdivided. This paper is concerned with a sub-type of the formally conditional sentences in German and Bulgarian, in particular, those in which the conditional form serves to tone down or ‘hedge’ the Speaker’s comment on what is expressed in the main clause.
The paper deals with some characteristics of the French plus-que-parfait in contrast with Bulgarian. After analysing the morphological similarities and differences of the corresponding tenses in the contrasted languages, the author dwells on a specific, though limited in use, function of the plus-que-parfait to set up a secondary narrative line. Its tendency to merge with the aorist is considered as closely related to and dependent on the merger of the aorist and passé composé observed in the spoken language. The translation problems arising from the incongruence of the contrasted language systems have also been discussed.
The paper is about twenty six Bulgarian loanwords in New Greek dialects, commonly cited to have been borrowed through Aromanian, viz., αστριάχα, βιρβιρίτσα, γρέντα, ζιάρι, ζμπόρος, μπαζντραβίτσα, μπίμ(η)τσα, νήλα, ρουγαίζω, μολίτσα, καστραβέτς, κοζόκα, κλακατίζω, μπιστιρή, μπέλα, γκάλιος, γκόλ’ους, γκουστερίτσα, ζαδούχαβ, κόσα, λιάσα, μοθσίτσα, πολίτσα, ρουγκόζ, γκαρλίτσα, ρόποτος. The following criteria of Aromanian mediation are established: phonological (the Bulgarian loanwords acquired in New Greek bear some traces of the Aromanian phonetic system), semantic (pastoral terminology), chronological (archaic Bulgarian borrowings in Daco-Romanian and Aromanian, features of which re-appear in New Greek), and areal.
The paper describes grammatical means of forming possessive adjectives in modern Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian and Russian. Productivity and use of possessive adjectives in these languages are discussed. A comparison is made between the frequency of occurrence of possessive adjective constructions and that of possessive genitive constructions.
The paper offers a comparison between word-formation patterns in Russian and Bulgarian with the meaning of superiority in some activity (Rus. перекричать, Bulg. надвикам ‘shout down’). Specific Bulgarian lexemes with the meaning of competition in some kind of activity (надвиквам се ‘shout each other down’, надвикване ‘shouting each other down’) are also discussed. The author draws the conclusion that the formation of such units and their corresponding concepts in the native speaker’s mind is brought about by a combination of a number of intralinguistic factors.
This is a cross-language study of the ship-building two-root terms across Bulgarian, Russian, English, German and French aiming at establishing the degree of isomorphism in their structural meaning (i. e. the literal meaning, the sense, not the vocabulary meaning). In the formation of the Bulgarian terms foreign term-building patterns, mostly Russian, are found to predominate. The authors offer some practical suggestions as to how to modify those terms exhibiting inconsistencies between form and meaning definition.
Through a discussion of phraseological units and metaphorical verbal meanings, the article attempts to get to the essence of the similarities between Bulgarian and Greek, i. e. specific analytical oppositions with certain types of verbs as their basic elements. The identity of these oppositions, on which the analytical character of both Bulgarian and Greek is grounded, determines the identical structural type of both languages, hence their identical phraseological type. Special stress is put on the importance of the long-lasting intensive contact between the two languages.
The subject under discussion is the word family with root morphemes град-/город- in the standard and local Russian dialects over the 19th and 20 th centuries. The author contends that the continual coexistence of words with either the Old Bulgarian nepolnoglasje (vocally reduced root morpheme) град-, or the East Slavic polnoglasje (full root morpheme) город-, has resulted in a significant shift in their use in literary Russian, brought about largely by the standard norms of usage. The words with an Old Bulgarian root morpheme, whether borrowed or locally derived, seem to make up a secondary layer in the localized Russian dialects, the vocally reduced forms preserving a number of the Old Bulgarian characteristics.
The subject of the study are conditional periods in whose prothasis an imaginary condition is expressed, connected with the present or a past point of reference. The purpose of the study is to establish (using linguistic material taken from works of modern Italian and Bulgarian writers) the similarities and differences between the linguistic items used in the analysed syntactic structure in both languages, as well as to discuss the reasons which determine them.
In Hungarian, there is a specific verbal category, known as object-definiteness, which is characterized by „the presence (or absence) of a definite 3rd person grammatical object“. The article discusses this category and the so-called definite conjugation of verbs. In search of equivalents for this grammatical category in Bulgarian, a list of the uses with verbs of the clytics го ‘him, it’, я ‘her’ and ги ‘them’ is compiled. After analysing 13 sentence functions of these movable form-formatives, the author shows how go ‘him, it’ evolved from a morpheme with the function of a doubled object (identifying reference) to an independent anaphorizer (or cataphorizer) of a distant familiar (definite) object. Summarizing the results of the contrastive analysis, the author draws the following conclusions: (1) the real function of the definite conjugation is to signal the object (definite direct object) if it is not expressed in the sentence; (2) the category of definiteness could also be applied to the Bulgarian verb; (3) in Bulgarian, there are affix-like particles for optional indication of the object, the recipient and even the beneficiary, and not only when it is a 3rd person object (or indirect object) at that.
The article discusses the opposition non-redundancy/redundancy which appears in translations from English into Bulgarian. The study is based on a corpus of English sentences which follow the pattern ‘Subject + Link verb + Predicative’, and their Bulgarian translation equivalents. Redundancy is existent in cases when a certain seme in the original utterance is expressed more than once in the translation. Interlingual asymmetry is mainly observed in the rendering of components such as [CHANGE OF STATE] and [SUBJECTIVE] and it is manifested in the oppositions to be, ставам ‘become’, оставам ‘remain’, изглеждам ‘seem’, чувствам се ‘feel’, оказвам се ‘prove to be’.
The paper presents the results of a psycholinguistic experiment carried out with 50 native speakers of Bulgarian and 25 native speakers of Russian. Eighteen Russian compound sentences with the conjunction a and their synonymous transformational variants with the conjunctions но and и were given to the Russian native speakers as a stimulus for evaluation. Adequate translation equivalents of the same sentences were given to the Bulgarian native speakers. The informants were asked to evaluate the correctness of each sentence on a scale of 7 (with 1 presenting the least appropriate). The data were subjected to a three-factor dispersion analysis. Thus, a complete interlingual semantic equivalence between the conjunctions a, но and и in the two languages was established and the semantic areas in which conjunctional synonymy is possible were determined.
The paper deals with the category of number of nouns (in a broad sense). The category cannot be considered to have been conclusively defined in linguistics either with regard to its universality or its systematicity. Various means and modes of expressing number in the world languages are presented: affixation, inner flexion, the article, suppletion, reduplication, quantifiers, and class markers. Attention has also been given to the dual number and its fate.