TAUTOLOGIES Х (SI) Е Х: A CORPUS-BASED INVESTIGATION

Abstract

The article deals with the Bulgarian tautologies X si e X and X e X, investigated on the basis of the „Bulgaria National Corpus“. The main purpose of this paper is: a) to examine the lexical features of binominative tautologies (semantic classes, frequency); b) to determine the role of the clitic si in the tautological pattern X si copula X; c) to outline the main differences between the two tautological patterns. Equative tautologies are necessarily true statements that encode the value of evidence. We affirm that in the pattern X si e X it is the modal particle si to assume the role of evidential marker. Analysis has shown that the pattern X si e X is subjected to some structural restrictions and lexical preferences, while the pattern X e X is not. We suggest that the construction X si e X, in contrast to X e X, represents a formal idiom.