APPROXIMATIVE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CONSTITUENTS OF ENGLISH AND BULGARIAN ALTERNATIVE INTERROGATIVE STRUCTURES

Abstract

The article explores the approximative relations between the constituents of English and Bulgarian alternative interrogative structures (AISs). The research has been based on authentic examples of AISs from eight corpora of written and spoken English and Bulgarian. According to the meaning conveyed, AISs fall into five groups: AISs (mostly Bulgarian) that express approximation, AISs that have idiomatic meaning (they are testified only in the Bulgarian corpora), AISs that carry alternative conditional-concessive meaning, AISs whose final constituent (under)specifies the meaning of the AIS, and AISs whose second constituent has a causal meaning (they occur only in the Bulgarian corpora).