CAS Newsletter 2009 / No 1-2
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
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Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
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Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
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Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
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Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
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In this text, the main object are the composita of the type koy shte da e in the contemporary Bulgarian language. Through specific examples, I establish the specificity of their semantics and their uses in the sentence. The adopted hypothesis is that they are used as indefinite pronouns, and that they share some of the semantic features of the indefinite pronouns of the types koy da e and koyto shte da e. I present the similarities and differences with other types of indefinite pronouns. Emphasis is placed on the paradigmatization of the composita of the koy shte da e type as indefinite pronouns. Some cases of ambiguity of the functions of this type of indefinite pronouns are considered.
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Bulgarian science has not yet established the average speech rate of adult native speakers of Bulgarian during a talking task. This pilot study aims to measure the average rate of natural speech by applying a methodology in which the measurable speech unit is syllable per minute. 30 individuals (10 men and 20 women) participated in the experiment. They were asked to talk for at least 2 minutes on a topic of their choice. The study found that the speech rate was 280 syllables per minute. Within this pilot experiment, a comparison was also made between men’s and women’s speech, showing a very insignificant difference genderwise.
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Prof. Lyubomir Miletich is the founder of the academic discipline of Bulgarian dialectology. His fundamental work on the Eastern Bulgarian dialects is the basis for all subsequent researchers of this language area, an important part of which is the Shumen dialect considered by Мiletich to be archaic and important for the classification of Bulgarian dialects. Here I make an overview of the works dedicated to the Shumen dialect, which are necessarily based on “Das Ostbulgarische”.
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The paper examines the hodonyms (names of streets and boulevards) in the city of Burgas from the end of the 19th century till the present day. It presents the reasons for their naming and renaming in different periods of the history of the city and the country
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The Christian doctrine regulates human life, behavior, and relationships with relatives and strangers through the commandments. Breaking the commandments is considered a sin, and overcoming one’s own weakness leads to one’s betterment and one’s coming closer to God, which is ultimately the goal of every Christian’s life. The desire for wealth and well-being is characteristic of human nature, but the Bible says otherwise: “Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." (Luke 18, 25). This article examines the characteristics of the perception of wealth and work from the perspective of popular culture and religion.
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In this paper, I discuss Russian deverbal zero-derived nouns, both prefixed (vyezd ‘departure’) and compound (gvozdodёr ‘tool for pulling out nails’, snegopad ‘snowfall’). It turns out that prefixed nouns mainly denote a situation or its result, while compound nouns may either denote a situation (snegopad) or a participant (agent or a similar instrument-like participant like gvozdodёr). The interpretation depends on the transitivity of the base verb: if it is transitive, the participant interpretation is chosen (gvozdodёr, lesorub ‘lumberjack’, lit. ‘wood-cut’), while with intransitive verbs, the default interpretation is situational (snegopad, ledoxod ‘ice drift’). I explain this possibility by the fact that in complex words, the zero suffix is attached simultaneously with root compounding, and the second root (e.g., -dёr-, -rub-) is not usually a word and does not have a fixed interpretation. By contrast, in words like vyezd the zero suffix is attached to the existent prefixed verb vyexat’ / vyezžat’ ‘drive out’. The properties of the verb are retained under nominalization, including the situational interpretation.
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The paper discusses the discourse marker де in the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund (Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, and Romanian). Theories on the etymology of де in the Balkan languages are analyzed in view of the likelihood of a substratum, Turkic or Slavic origin. The focus is on the use and meaning of the discourse marker. In Bulgarian, Greek, and Albanian, three main meanings can be distinguished, along with some set phrases, while Romanian deviates from the Balkan pattern in the use of the marker.
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The study analyzes the acoustic characteristics of the bilabial consonants bj, pj and mj in the Bulgarian language and of the bilabial consonants b, p and m in the Romanian language, when preceding the graphic combination ea. The comparative analysis is based on the type of F1 and F2 transition, as the transition of F1 frequencies with soft consonants is lower at the beginning (onset) and higher at the end (offset), while F2 is characterized by higher initial frequencies and lower final frequencies. The experiments show that the acoustic characteristics of the Romanian bilabial consonants b, p and m before ea are close to the acoustic characteristics of the Bulgarian soft bilabial consonants.
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My paper intends to illustrate a possible didactic scenario of how to teach The Subjunctive Mood to international students enrolled in the academic program entitled „The Preparatory Year of Romanian Language for Foreign Citizens” at Bucharest University of Economic Studies. The study is the partial result of teaching the „Practical Course of Romanian: Phonetics, Vocabulary and Sentence Structures” for about 9 academic years. This is part of a wider research, now in progress, as I am working on a Practical Romanian Grammar Book for Foreigners. I do believe that after The Present Tense in Romanian, the Subjunctive Mood is considered to be the 2nd most difficult tense in Romanian language, by foreign students, although there is a close grammatical connection between these 2 verbal tenses aspects. I can say for sure that knowing very well the Present Tense in Romanian ensures in the same time a good acquirement for the students of the Subjunctive Mood too. Of course, the peculiar grammatical aspects for the 3rd singular and plural person are to be mentioned and exemplified.
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The primary aim of this study is to propose an effective approach for characterising the frame elements of conceptual frames within the Bulgarian FrameNet using noun classes. This approach will facilitate the prediction of comprehensive and semantically valid combinations between verbal lexical units that evoke conceptual frames and appropriate nouns. The study provides a concise overview of the semantic classifications of nouns in WordNet, Corpus Pattern Analysis, FrameNet, and VerbAtlas, emphasising their significance in predicting verb-noun compatibility. The structure of the Bulgarian FrameNet (BulFrame) is presented, containing components adapted from FrameNet for Bulgarian along with a substantial amount of lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic information specific to the Bulgarian language. One distinctive feature of the Bulgarian FrameNet is the specification of noun classes, indicating appropriate nouns for the lexical realisation of frame elements. By aligning synonym sets from WordNet with the semantic types of Corpus Pattern Analysis and FrameNet, as well as with the selective preferences of VerbAtlas, the foundational structure of the Extended Ontology of Noun Semantic Classes is established. The Ontology concepts are linked, not exclusively, to synonym sets from WordNet and thereby to sets of nouns suitable for combination with verbal lexical units that evoke the corresponding conceptual frames. The contribution of this development lies in detailing the steps for selecting semantic classes (concepts) and constructing the structure of the Extended Ontology of Noun Semantic Classes.
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This study focuses on the analysis of the frame element Body part as a semantic feature to describe semantic frames according to the hierarchical structure in FrameNet. The aim is a semantical description and a methodological presentation for information extraction and analysis of a group of verbs according to the presence of a specific frame element. The research is part of the development of the Bulgarian FrameNet (BulFrame), a system for visualisation and editing of conceptual frames that are defined in the system (Koeva, Doychev 2022). The analysis is carried out by extracting verbs that are conceptually described by semantic frames with the core frame element Body Part. Semantic resources that are created for the purpose of semantic, syntactic and conceptual knowledge of verbs are used in the study. Mapping with verb synsets from the Bulgarian WordNet is made for the observation. The nouns that the verb conjuncts are considered with respect to distinct synsets and semantic types as a possible realisation of the verb. As a result, a grouping of nouns associated with semantic types from Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) is proposed.
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The chapter outlines the properties of the semantic class of verbs of communication in terms of the most representative FrameNet frames of higher frequency and the syntactic realisation of the frame elements in different valence patterns in English and Bulgarian. For the purposes of the study we employ two large lexical-semantic resources: (a) the Princeton WordNet (Fellbaum 1998b), and the Bulgarian WordNet (Koeva 2021), and (b) FrameNet (Baker et al. 1998). In particular, the analysis is centred on the information included in each of the resources and how it can be used towards their mutual enrichment and the extension of their coverage. We discuss the general organisation of the verb lexis representing the domain of communication: the prototypical frame Communication and frames inheriting from it, focusing on the frames Statement and Telling as two of the most representative frames of verbal communication. The objective is to validate the realisation of semantic frames in corpus data using the semantically annotated corpora SemCor (Miller et al. 1993b) and BulSemCor (Koeva et al. 2006). While we use resources for English and Bulgarian, we discuss the universal and language-specific aspects of this description and the transferability of knowledge across languages. The observations made on the valence patterns and the syntactic expression of the core frame elements are used to verify the validity of the assigned frame, while also highlighting the similarities and differences both between verbs from the same domain in one language (Bulgarian) and between equivalent/similar senses across languages (Bulgarian and English).
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The study offers a description of a group of verbs from WordNet with the semantic class (primitive) “verbs for contact”, which belong to the set of commonly used vocabulary in Bulgarian. The description focuses on verbs of contact combined with displacement, which include verbs for attaching, detaching, placing, removing, filling, and emptying. A semantic-syntactic description is proposed, which covers the frame elements of the corresponding FrameNet semantic frame and their corresponding syntactic implementations. Situations represented by the semantic frames Attachment, Detachment, Filling, Emptying, Manipulation and Touching are considered. The analyzed information is based on manual verification, editing and addition of the semi-automatic correlation of two large semantic language resources — WordNet and FrameNet. Subclasses of motion contact verbs have been proposed according to the location of physical contact.
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The research focuses on verbs of perception and their conceptual descriptions in Bulgarian. An analytical review of previous theoretical generalisations as well as scientifically applied research is presented. The variety of constructions and syntactic realisations that the representatives of this class of predicates project onto their sentential surroundings serves as a starting point for the present study. The analysis is based on semantic and partly morphological information about the lexical units from WordNet (Fellbaum 1998; Koeva 2021a), as well as on semantic-syntactic specificities by which the lexical units under study are represented in FrameNet (Baker et al. 1998; Ruppenhofer et al. 2016). Seven frames are considered, which demonstrate high frequency and a wide variety of verbal lexical units. The description includes grammatical features of the verbs, semantic and syntactic constraints that the verbal lexical units impose on their frame elements, mapping of the frame elements to a certain synonym set or semantic class of WordNet nouns that corresponds to the properties of the elements in the frame. The status of the frame elements is also adopted from FrameNet, which is essential for the realisation of the given lexical unit.
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This study investigates the transition of Moroccan students from French-speaking to English-speaking destinations and programs for studying abroad. Employing quantitative research methods, trends and patterns in destination preference over time are identified. The results unveil a notable shift in destination preferences among Moroccan students, moving from French-speaking countries to English-speaking ones in recent years. The implications of these findings offer valuable insights and enhanced utility for stakeholders, particularly universities and governmental entities aiming to allure international students from North Africa.
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