ACTION-RESULTANT OPPOSITION IN BULGARIAN AND GERMAN LANGUAGES – COMPARATIVE ASPECTS

Abstract

The object of analysis in the present contrastive study is the actionresultant oppositions in Bulgarian and German languages. The purpose of the study is to identify the acts of inter-language symmetry and asymmetry in the expression of resultant meaning. The peculiarities of the German actionresultant paradigm, distinguishing it from the Bulgarian one, are mainly due to three factors. First of all, it is the issue of double semantics of the German perfect, which has the potential to express both the meaning – resultativeness (as it is in the Bulgarian language) and the precedence (in Bulgarian it is an aorist function). A number of linguists note that the German perfect is interchangeable with the preterit (the past tense), because it functions as a past tense. On the other hand, the researchers point out that the perfect can relate to both the present and the future. The second factor, which distinguishes the German action-resultant correlations from the Bulgarian ones, is the lack of imperfect1 (as a separate grammeme) in the German language. The third one is that in Bulgarian language the infinitive has fallen away, but in German even resultative infinitive forms are available.