The spread of the imperfective 1st person singular and plural inflections to the perfective conjugations in Modern Bulgarian

There are not very many attempts to investigate the problem of the spread of the athematic first person singular and plural endings to the thematic verbs in the Slavic languages (Darden 1995, Janda 1994, 1996 and Mirchev 1978). The three authors take the diachronic perspective to the topic and investigate the processes that occurred between the Proto Indo-European and Old Church Slavonic stage of the language. This paper speaks to the spread of the athematic 1st person singular and plural inflections in Bulgarian language. The claim here is that the spread of the first person singular -m and first person plural -me to the thematic conjugations in Bulgarian had started as a process of separating the morph.-syntactic functions perfective (finite and non-habitual) to the verbs which do not accept the endings at hand and imperfective (non-finite and iterative) to the ones which do accept the endings in hand. At the present stage of the Standard Modern Bulgarian the inflections spread to the group of verbs that appear with same paradigms for both perfective and imperfective aspects. This is a process that opens the stage for further reanalysis and leveling of the paradigms. That reanalysis starts from the plural ending (as there it cannot cause any ambiguity in the perception of the newly created form) and than spreads to the singular ending. The preliminary analysis of a corpora of a Bulgarian chat room log files and responses to an e-mail questionnaire shows that the spread of the first person plural ending -me to the perfective paradigms is at a stage were it is accepted as a norm in the colloquial speech and even starts its spread into the standard dialect of the language. Evidence for this claim is the appearance of the ending in the written mode. However, the singular ending -m is still perceived as a marker for a non-educated speech, thus appearing only in jokes with pejorative meaning in the colloquial speech.

References:

DARDEN, B. J. 1995. Rebuilding morphology without grammaticalization. Papers from the 31st regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. 1995. 1: 110-26

JANDA, L. A. 1994. The spread of athematic 1st sg -m in the major west Slavic languages. Slavic and East European Journal. 38.1: 90-119

JANDA, L. A. 1994. Back from the brink: a study of how relic forms in languages serve as source material for analogical extension. (LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 01). Munich/Newcastle: LINCOM EUROPA