Contemporary Bulgarian Grammar and Some Context-related Usage Features

Abstract

The article consists of two parts. The first part examines key grammatical phenomena in Bulgarian from a normative perspective. From a morphological perspective, these include the loss of cases in the nouns, the existence of a definite article together with its main functions, the relationship between grammatical gender and biological gender, the realization of arguments, the existence of a count form, the loss of the infinitive and its replacement with a finite form, the rich temporal system, the presence of evidential forms, etc. From a syntactic perspective, these phenomena refer to pro-drop, main agreement strategies, object doubling, etc. The second part focuses on certain tendencies in language use within real-world contexts. These indicate a gradual shift from grammatical marking to pragmatic influence. Among the affected phenomena are: subjectpredicate agreement, politeness formulas, remnant case forms in some pronouns, plural forms, functions of the definite article, and reflexive pronouns.