Българската глаголна категория условност в балкански и отвъдбалкански контекст (Формите за бъдеще време в миналото и за условно наклонение в бълг. превод на 1984 от Д. Оруел и съответствията им в сръбския, румънския, унгарския и английския текст)
The Bulgarian Verbal Category of Conditionality in a Balkan Context and Beyond (The Future-in-the-Past and Conditional Forms in the Bulg. Translation of G. Orwell’s 1984 and Their Counterparts in the Serbian, Romanian, Hungarian and English Versions)

Summary/Abstract: In Bulgarian, the future in the past – sometimes referred to as the Balkan conditional and structurally similar to the conditional mood of the languages of Western European – exists alongside the conditional mood shared with other Slavic languages. What are the correspondences of these categories in other Balkan languages? This study com-pares the uses of the future in the past (100 instances) and the conditional mood (131 instances) in the Bulgarian translation of George Orwell’s novel 1984 with their counterparts in the Romanian and Serbian translations, as well as in the English original and the Hungarian translation. In more than half of the cases, the English would-conditional is rendered in Bulgarian by either the future in the past or the conditional mood, almost equally. (The conditional mood of the verb мога ‘can, may’, corresponding in the original mainly to could, warrants separate discussion.) In Romanian and Serbian, the principal counterpart of the Bulgarian conditional mood is likewise the conditional mood. The future in the past corresponds either to the same mood or to the future tense (in Serbian) and the future in the past (in Romanian), with roughly equal frequency; moreover, in about 90% of the cases the correspondence is identical in both languages. In contrast, in the non-Balkan Hungarian language, the most salient feature is the use of potential verbs, whose various forms frequently correspond to the conditional mood of мога ‘can, may’. As counterparts to the future in the past – alternating with the conditional mood – we find the present tense alongside the future. However, the correlation between the use of the indicative and conditional moods in Hungarian, on the one hand, and in Romanian or Serbian, on the other, is weaker than that observed between the two Balkan Indo-European languages.

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