Aspects of Bulgarian Syntax: Complementizers and WH Constructions

The study of complementation and complementizers has been an area of great interest for syntactic theory in recent years. This book presents a description of complementation in Bulgarian, with particular emphasis on questions and relative clauses (the so-called WH constructions) and their interaction with the set of clause-introducing words known as complementizers. WH constructions and clauses containing complementizers have been studied intensively in English and a number of other, mostly Germanic or Romance languages, and a variety of hypotheses concerning the role of the complementizer position ("COMP") have been put forward in the literature. An examination of these constructions in Bulgarian, a language which has not previously been studied in any depth in a generative framework, raises problems for some of these hypotheses, provides additional evidence in favor of others, and brings to light new types of data which a theory of WH constructions must account for. The goals of this book are both descriptive -- to provide an analysis of a part of the grammar of Bulgarian, with detailed data that will be of interest to Slavists and Balkanists as well as general linguists, and theoretical--to use these data to shed light on broader crosslinguistic questions of the nature of COMP, complementizers, and WH constructions. Contents: Introduction; Word Order and Basic Sentence Structure; COMP and Complementizers; WH Movement: Questions; Relative Clauses; Free Relatives; Conclusion: Bulgarian and Syntactic Theory; Abbreviations; Sources of Example Sentences; References; Index "Catherine Rudin has, I feel, done Slavists and general linguists a valuable service in her monograph... It will be read with profit by a wide range of specialists." (SEEJ) "...clear in its presentation of data, considerate in its presentation of technicalities, and decidedly thought-provoking." (SEER) The 2nd Revised edition published in 2013 is now available (ISBN:978-0-89357-405-5)