Съдбата на инфинитива и неговите функционални аналози в българския език
The Fate of the Infinitive and Its Functional Counterparts in the Bulgarian Language

Summary/Abstract: The Bulgarian language in its history has almost completely lost the ancient Bulgarian infinitive, replaced it with a da-construction, its grammatical status has attracted the attention of linguists. The article discusses the history of the study of the process of disappearance of the infinitive and the reflection of its internal system bases. The author seeks to expand the idea of the use of the infinitive in the written monuments of the middle Bulgarian and modern Bulgarian periods, the data of which show the long-term development of the transformation. This grammatical transition has significant consequences for the whole system of language both at the level of syntax, where more universal possibilities for expressing meaning relations, especially modal, have been formed, and at the level of morphology. It exhibits an important morphological tendency in the development of new balancing synthetic features of the verb in response to the tendency to analyticism – in the enhancement of the synthetic way of expressing the category of person. The strengthening of conjugation in Bulgarian, related to the emergence of da-construction, demonstrates the development of a unique grammatical structure that distinguishes it from non-Balkan Slavic languages. As a result of this innovation, the modern Bulgarian language has not lost the ability to explicit the meanings characteristic of the infinitive, it has a variety of lexical and grammatical means for their expression. As for the form of the old Bulgarian infinitive, it served in an abbreviated form for the development of prohibitive forms of the imperative. The author concludes that these forms acquire productivity in modern Bulgarian speech, are used in different types of discourse and demonstrate both stability and grammatical system. The mentioned features of the transformation of the infinitive and its functional analogues in the Bulgarian language are a vivid example of language development and new use of the resources of the language system.

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