In the evidentiality system of Bulgarian, there are three evidential auxiliaries that form complex verbal forms. The paper analyzes their potential to mark non-reliability in political discourse by using the ParlaMint-BG corpus of parliamentary debates. The method of the study includes detection, categorisation and context analysis of the evidentials formed with auxiliaries. The results prove that the evidential auxiliaries function as markers of non-reliability, especially in argumentative text type such as political discourse.

Thе study explores the interaction between the participants in the communication process with respect to their knowledge about the situation presented in the utterance when transforming direct into indirect speech using a verbum dicendi. The speaker has a choice between firsthand (indicative tenses) which by definition denotes a witnessed situation and non-firsthand which presents the situation as non-witnessed. The interplay between the grammatical marking and the speaker’s evidential strategy is analyzed by applying a corpus method. The data of the Bulgarian National Corpus are used to detect the preferences for a given strategy considering also the grammatical person which indicates the level of knowledge of the communicants about the situation: the 1st person shows the strong knowledge of the speaker, the 2nd person is related to the strong knowledge of the listener, and the 3rd person is associated with a weak knowledge of both participants. Illustrative examples representative for a given situation are extracted from the corpus and subjected to a context analysis.

The paper analyses the types of constructions that express a subordinate event after a verb of perception in the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund. The subordinate clauses that may follow a verb of perception are a result of common historical processes in Bulgarian, Albanian, Romanian and Greek: the substitution of infinitive by subjunctive and the neutralization of modal and declarative conjunctions after verbs of perception. Additionally, in Albanian and Romanian among the non-finite verbal forms gerund may be found after perception verbs. For the analysed syntactic structures in Bulgarian a corpus approach is further applied in order to support the linguistic analysis with quantitative data.

The paper presents a corpus-based study of the past active participles in Bulgarian with respect of their aspectual and temporal characteristics. As this type of participles combine two morphological markers, a special attention is paid on their interaction in different tenses, moods and evidentials. The source of language material used for the study is the Bulgarian National Corpus. The paper is organized in terms of morphological oppositions, aspectual and temporal, analyzing the functions of the participles in compound verbal forms.

In this paper we present a method for automatic assignment of morphosemantic relations between derivationally related verb–noun pairs of synsets in the Bulgarian WordNet (BulNet) and for semantic filtering of those relations. The filtering process relies on the meaning of noun suffixes and the semantic compatibility of verb and noun taxonomic classes. We use the taxonomic labels assigned to all the synsets in the Princeton WordNet (PWN) – one label per synset – which denote their general semantic class. In the first iteration we employ the pairs <noun suffix : noun label> to filter out part of the relations. In the second iteration, which uses as input the output of the first one, we apply a stronger semantic filter. It makes use of the taxonomic labels of the noun-verb synset pairs observed for a given morphosemantic relation. In this way we manage to reliably filter out impossible or unlikely combinations. The results of the performed experiment may be applied to enrich BulNet with morphosemantic relations and new synsets semi-automatically, while facilitating the manual work and reducing its cost.

Romanian and Bulgarian are Balkan languages with rich derivational morphology that, if introduced into their respective wordnets, can aid broadening of the wordnet content and the possible NLP applications. In this paper we present a joint work on introducing derivation into the Bulgarian and the Romanian WordNets, BulNet and RoWordNet, respectively, by identifying and subsequently labelling the derivationally and semantically related noun-verb pairs. Our research aims at providing a framework for a comparative study on derivation in the two languages and offering training material for the automatic identification and assignment of derivational and morphosemantic relations needed in various applications.