Modern Bulgarian shares a conditional mood with the other Slavic languages, but it also has developed a future-in-the-past tense which is structurally analogous to many Western European languages’ category traditionally called a conditional mood in their grammars. The distinction between these two forms is sometimes elusive and can be difficult for native speakers of Slavic languages who are learning Bulgarian. In this paper we consider the uses of the Bulgarian conditional mood and future-in-the-past tense in a parallel corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian text, examining the corresponding wording in Ukrainian, where the conditional mood is supplemented by modal verbs, and discuss the breadth of choices open to translators when working in each direction.

We present a comparative study of p(e)re-reduplication in Bulgarian and Ukrainian, based on material from a parallel corpus of bilingual texts. We analyse all occurrences found in the corpus of close sequences and conjunctions of two cognate words, the second of which features the intensive and recursive prefix pre- (Bulgarian) or pere- (Ukrainian). We find that in Bulgarian this construction occurs more frequently with finite verb forms, and in Ukrainian with participles and nouns. There is also a correlation with the mode of action denoted by the prefix: in its intensive meaning it turns up more often in Bulgarian, in its recursive meaning in the two languages equally, and in Ukrainian there are more occasions where it cannot be identified as either intensive or recursive. Finally, in both languages instances of p(e)re-reduplication are most common, by a wide marge, in texts with Ukrainian originals.

Sometimes one needs to produce a text in which many numbers have to be written out in words. Writing such a text and ensuring it is error-free can be a burden, especially if the author is not fluent in the language. Such may occur when working on a reference grammar, a research paper or presentation, or a problem on number names for a contest in linguistics. A remedy is to prepare the text with TEX and let some parts be generated automatically. The human effort this takes is to compose a grammar that describes the features of the numeral system. This paper discusses how this is done.

We present an experiment in using a corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian parallel texts for the automatised construction of a bilingual lexicosemantic network representing the semantic field of BREAD. We discuss the extraction of the relevant material from the corpus, the production of networks with varying parameters, some issues of the interpretation of these networks, and possible ways of making them more accurate and informative.

Feminitives are formed and used in all Slavic languages, but the productivity of their formation and the intensity of their use are not the same everywhere. They are often subject to various intralinguistic and extralinguistic restrictions. In this paper we present a study of feminitives based on a parallel Bulgarian– Ukrainian corpus, with a focus on those occasions on which a feminitive in one language corresponds to a masculine (rarely neuter) noun in the other. The experiment shows that Bulgarian uses feminitives with considerably greater regularity than Ukrainian does, and we discuss the semantic classes of nouns that fail to form feminitives most often and the efect of the source language in translated text and of the author’s and translator’s individual preferences.

This paper presents a contrastive investigation of linguistic problems based on number names in different languages and intended for secondary-school students. We examine the eight problems of this type that have been assigned at the International Linguistics Olympiad throughout the years and compare the phenomena in the number systems featured there with those of the working languages of the Olympiad and other languages known to be familiar to the participants. On the basis of a statistical analysis of the results achieved by the contestants we draw conclusions regarding the ways in which the difficulty of a problem depends on its structure and the kinds of linguistic phenomena featured in it.

The combination of the meanings ‘while’ and ‘until’ in a single lexeme and the use of expletive negation with the latter meaning are widespread phenomena that are a rich source of research problems. In this paper we present a comparative bilingual Bulgarian and Ukrainian corpus-based study of several conjunctions that share these two meanings. We discuss the difference in the frequency of expletive negation in the two languages, the use of až ‘even, all the way’ in Ukrainian and the impact of the original language in translated texts.

The central role of electronic language resources in education is widely recognised (cf. Brinkley et al, 1999; Bennett, 2010; Derzhanski et al., 2007, among others). The variety and ease of access of such resources predetermines their extensive use in both research and education. With regard to teaching mathematical linguistics, electronic dictionaries and annotated corpora play a particularly important part, being an essential source of information for composing linguistic problems and presenting linguistic knowledge. This paper discusses the need for electronic resources, especially for less studied or low-resource languages, their creation and various uses in teaching linguistics to secondary school students, with examples mostly drawn from our practical work.

This paper presents a comparative bilingual corpus-based study of the use of several frequent temporal adverbs and adverbial expressions (‘always’, ‘sometimes’, ‘never’ and their synonyms) in Bulgarian and Ukrainian. The Ukrainian items were selected with the aid of synonym dictionaries of words and of set expressions, the corpus was used to identify their most common Bulgarian counterparts, and the frequencies of the correspondences were compared and scrutinised for possibly informative regularities.