Bulgarian edin: The Rise of an Indefinite Article∗

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Ljudmila Geist articles have the same root as the numeral in the respective language, cf. German ein, Turkish bir, and Spanish un. Hence, it would not be a surprise if Bulgarian edin also had the function of an indefinite article in addition to its numeral function. The aim of this paper will be to test the hypothesis of Friedman (1976) that Bulgarian edin can be used as an indefinite article. In particular, the questions that I want to answer are: • What functions can edin as a marker of indefinite reference cover and how are they related? • What is the contribution of edin to the meaning of the noun phrase? • What might be the outlines of its further development? To determine the functions of edin and its semantic contribution I will turn to the work on the grammaticalization of indefinite articles in Givón (1981) and Heine (1997). The main idea going back to Givón is that numerals on the way of developing into indefinite articles undergo a process of semantic bleaching, for which a scale like in (2a) can be assumed. I will call the corresponding grammaticalization stages as in (2b). (2) Grammaticalization of indefinite articles a. quantification > referentiality > non-referentiality 1 b. numeral > indefinite determiner > indefinite article Stage I Stage II Stage III The function as numeral (Stage I) is the starting point on the scale. The indefinite article (Stage III) represents the terminal point with the highest degree of grammaticalization. But besides the starting stage numeral and the terminal stage indefinite article there is an intermediate stage called indefinite determiner, where the numeral loses its function of indicating cardinality or quantity and acquires the function of indicating indefinite reference. At this stage the indefinite marker is used only with referential indefinite phrases; at the last stage the indefinite marker can be used with non-referential NPs as well. This scale will be more finely differentiated in Section 2. Although I will focus on synchronic functions of edin in modern Bulgarian, the work on grammaticalization of indefinite articles by Givón (1981) and Heine (1997) will be helpful in this discussion since different stages in the diachronic process of grammaticalization of indefiniteness markers can be seen as their synchronically attested functions. 1 Givón uses the term genericity instead of non-referentiality.
Bulgarian edin: The Rise of an Indefinite Article The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 criteria for distinguishing the numeral from the marker of indefinite reference will be discussed. In Section 3 we concentrate on the intermediate status of edin as an indefinite determiner, and in Section 4 we test whether formal and semantic criteria for the terminal stage, the stage of indefinite articles, apply to edin. To illustrate the numeral and indefinite functions of edin I will use examples from the linguistic literature and complement them with constructed examples that I tested with informants. 2 2 Distinguishing the numeral from the marker of indefinite reference The original function of edin in Bulgarian is to indicate the cardinality of one, which is the numeral function. In this section I will introduce some tests for singling out the numeral function 3 from other functions of edin partly known from the literature (e.g. Nikolaeva 1979, Šmelev 2002 for Russian odin, Weiss 2004 for Macedonian eden): (i) Combination with focus particles and numeral modifiers The numeral edin can be combined with focus particles such as samo ‘only’, or modifiers such as točno ‘exactly’ or naj-malko ‘at least’, which emphasize the cardinality. (3) Samo edin telefon li imate? only one telephone Q.part you-have ‘Do you have only one telephone (or two)?’ 2 I would like to express my gratitude to Elena Karagjosova, Milena Kühnast, Svetlana Petrova, Zorica Trpcevska, Boryana Max Bincheva Bittner and Nadia Varley for evaluating and commenting on my Bulgarian examples. 3 Although edin, like its counterparts in other Slavic languages, can semantically serve as a numeral, it differs morphologically from other numerals. It agrees with the noun in gender and resembles adjectives in this respect. Three gender forms have to be distinguished in the singular: the masculine edin ‘one.masc’, the neuter edno ‘one.neut’, and the feminine form edna ‘one.fem’. In Slavic languages with morphological case forms, the counterpart of ONE agrees with nouns not only in gender but also in case; cf. Russian Ja govoril s odnim sosedom ‘I spoke with one.inst neighbor.inst’. Hence, it differs from numerals like TWO, THREE and FOUR, which govern the genitive case on the quantified noun; cf. in Russian the example of genitive government in dva soseda ‘two.nom neighbor.gen’ with the example of the case agreement in odin sosed ‘one.nom neighbor.nom’.
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Bulgarian edin: The Rise of an Indefinite Article∗

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