The paper presents a corpus-based study of emotive predicates (verbs and predicative constructions with adjectival, adverbial or noun phrases) in Bulgarian with respect to their syntactic characteristics. The sources of empirical data analyzed here are Bulgarian National Corpus, Corpus of Bulgarian Political and Journalistic Speech and Bulgarian part of Multilingual Comparable Corpora of Parliamentary Debates ParlaMint. The analyzes are organized in terms of morpho-syntactic features of emotive predicates, transitivity, syntactic functions and theta-roles of their arguments. Emotive predicates denote a state or an event involving an affective experience. As part of the special semantic class of psychological/Experiencer verbs, they have been studied in relation to the interaction between lexical semantics and argument realization. Bulgarian data confirm the well-established division of Psych predicates into three classes: Subject Experiencer (fear type verbs), Object Experiencer (frighten type verbs), Dative Experiencer. The third class is mostly represented by adverbial predicates.

We present and discuss problems in creating a lemmatised index to transcriptions of Bulgarian speech, including the prerequisites for such an index, and why we consider an index preferable to a search engine for this particular kind of text.