UC Berkeley GAIA Books

UC Berkeley GAIA Books Title Revitalizing Bulgarian Dialectology Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hc6x8hp Authors Alexander, Ronelle Zhobov, Vladimir Publication Date 2004-07-28 Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hc6x8hp#supplemental Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Revitalizing Bulgarian Dialectology Edited by Ronelle Alexander & Vladimir Zhobov Published in association with University of California Press Introduction This volume summarizes the results of a joint North American - Bulgarian research project in dialectology, which culminated in a joint field expedition in the summer of 1996. The project was co-directed by Professor Ronelle Alexander of the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor Todor Bojadz¬iev and then Assistant Professor Vladimir Zµobov, both of Sofia University. The field research team was composed of three teachers (in which Professor Alexander represented the American side and Vladimir Zµobov and Georgi Kolev represented the Bulgarian side), three North Americans who were at the time graduate students in Slavic linguistics (Jonathan Barnes and Matthew Baerman at the University of California, Berkeley, and Elisabeth Elliott at the University of Toronto) and three Bulgarians who were at the time undergraduate students in Slavic philology at Sofia University (Tanya Delc¬eva, Kamen Petrov and Pet¿r Sµis¬kov); Krasimira Koleva of Sµumen University also joined the team during the first phase of the expedition. Field research was carried out in three different regions of Bulgaria: the villages of Kozic¬ino and Golica (often referred to together as the “Erkec¬” dialect, after the older name of the first of these villages) in eastern Bulgaria, the town of Trjavna (plus outlying villages) in north central Bulgaria, and the villages of Gela and Stik¿l (near Sµiroka L¿ka) in the Rhodope mountains. The first of these areas is known as one of the most archaic and intriguing in Bulgarian dialectology, the second is located in the area which formed the basis for the Bulgarian standard language, and the third is located within one of the richest (and most completely studied) areas of Bulgarian dialectology. The volume is divided into four sections and an epilogue. The first section gives background material and outlines the nature of the project being reported on, and the epilogue reports on the ultimate results of the project. The other three sections constitute the bulk of the volume, comprising ten individual research reports by expedition members. Some report on research experiments or projects initiated and carried out during (or as a direct result of) the expedition, while others integrate material gathered on the expedition into their larger ongoing research projects. Section I includes two articles discussing Bulgarian dialectology as a general discipline. Todor Bojadz¬iev (“The Achievements and Tasks of Bulgarian Dialectology”) first gives a concise but substantive overview of the achievements and goals of Bulgarian dialectology (seen from within). Ronelle Alexander (“The Vitality, and Revitalizing, of Bulgarian Dialectology”) follows with a brief view of Bulgarian dialectology seen from the outsider’s perspective, and goes on to describe both the genesis of the current project and the methods of its implementation. Section II is devoted to phonetics and phonology. It begins with a paper by Jonathan Barnes (“Palatalization in Bulgarian Dialects, an Experiment in Phoneme Categorization”), which reports on a listening test carried out in three different regions of Bulgaria, two of them locales visited in the course of the joint expedition and the third visited upon conclusion of the field expedition. This paper, although not part of Barnes’ 2002 UC Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation, is tangentially related to it. Section II continues with a paper by Pet¿r Sµis¬kov (“Elision of Unstressed Vowels in the Erkec¬ Dialect”), taken from the author’s 1998 Sofia University “diplomna rabota” (senior thesis), which itself was written on the basis of data gathered during the joint expedition. Section II concludes with a paper by Vladimir Zµµobov (“Uvulars in the Erkec¬ Dialect”), which reports on an experiment devised in Sofia intended to refine the author’s understanding of data collected in the field. Section III is the most varied in content. It opens with a long paper by Tanja Delc¬eva (“Towards a Lexicon of the Erkec¬ Dialect”). This work, substantially equivalent to the author’s 1998 Sofia University “diplomna rabota” (senior thesis) presents a brief discussion on the significance of the Erkec¬ dialect for Bulgarian dialectal lexicology as a field, followed by a relatively complete lexicon together with English translations. Section III continues with a paper by Elisabeth Elliott (“Imam (‘Have’) Plus Past Passive Participle in the Bulgarian Erkec¬ Dialect”) derived from the author’s 2001 University of Toronto Ph.D. dissertation on constructions composed of the verb “imam” plus past participle, in which data from the Erkec¬ dialect are contrasted with those from other Slavic languages and dialects. Section III concludes with a report by Krasimira Koleva (“Third Person Pronouns in Bulgarian Dialects in the Erkec¬ and Teteven Areas”), which compares the pronominal system of the Erkec¬ dialect to that of another archaic dialect, the Teteven dialect. Section IV is devoted to questions of accent, and specifically to problems of “double accent”, the research topic out of which the project itself grew. It begins with a paper by Ronelle Alexander (“The Scope of Double Accent in Bulgarian Dialects”) summarizing the state of work in progress on this topic and outlining perspectives for future research, with particular focus on material recorded in Erkec¬. This section continues with a brief report by Matthew Baerman (“Poststressing Complementizers in Erkec¬ [Kozic¬ino]”), which views some of the same data from a different theoretical perspective; the topic of this report is related to but not identical with that of Baerman’s 1999 UC Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation. The third paper in this section, by Georgi Kolev (“Dialectal Accent Shifts and Double Accent in the Bulgarian Linguistic Region”), discusses in detail the rhythmical nature of double accent. The final piece in section IV (“Hierarchies of Stress Assignment in Bulgarian Dialects”) is co-authored by the three expedition leaders (Vladimir Zµobov, Ronelle Alexander, Georgi Kolev). This is the key paper in the volume, not only because it presents new data and conclusions arrived at on the basis of a field experiment carried out by the team, but also because it exemplifies by its very organization the goals and achievements of the entire project, it is the key piece in the volume. The volume’s epilogue (“Towards a Revitalization of Bulgarian Dialectology”) is co-authored by the editors (Ronelle Alexander and Vladimir Zµobov). This piece assesses the results not only of this experiment but also of the expedition as a whole, places these results within the context of Bulgarian dialectology as a discipline, and outlines perspectives for future cooperative work. For help in bringing this volume to fruition, we are grateful to International and Area Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, for sponsoring electronic publication of the volume; additionally we thank Sofia University for hosting an open round table discussion which allowed us to present the expedition results to the Bulgarian scholarly public. A number of individuals also helped to bring the work (both on the expedition and on the volume) to fruition, among them David Szanton, Roy Tennant, Jerry Lubenow and Karla Nielson at the University of California, Berkeley, and Vasilka Radeva, Bojan Biolc¬ev and Panajot Karagjozov of Sofia University. Most of all, however, we wish to note the contribution of our mentor, the late Maksim Mladenov, without whose inspiration and guidance we would not have been able even to envision this collaborative project, much less carry it out. His spirit was with us through the entire expedition and the preparation of this volume, and we are certain that it will remain with us, and those who follow us in the revitalized Bulgarian dialectology, for many years yet to come. The field expedition itself was supported in part by a grant from the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) with funds provided by the United States Department of State through the Title VIII Program. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed. Transliteration note: In the actual papers, standard Bulgarian is transliterated according to the “academic” system of transliteration, using s¬, z¬, c¬, j and x where more “popular” systems often use sh, zh, ch, i and h. Additionally, the vowel letter pronounced as shwa and called “er-goljam” in Bulgarian is rendered by the actual Bulgarian letter, ¿. In the volume’s title page and in its table of contents, however, the “popular” transliteration system is used. The Achievements and Tasks of Bulgarian Dialectology Todor Bojadz¬iev Modern Bulgarian dialectology is heir to a rich scholarly tradition. Its founder is generally considered to be the Russian Slavist Viktor Grigorovic¬, who in 1848 published “A Sketch of Travels in European Turkey.” On the basis of his own observations from his journeys in Bulgarian lands, he noted a number of dialectological characteristics, and was the first to attempt a scholarly classification of Bulgarian dialects

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