The Morphological Structure of Possessive and Demonstrative Pronouns

The aim of the study is to present models for the morpheme segmentation of demonstrative and possessive pronouns by describing the specifics of the inflections and suffixes that take part in their formation. The changes that have occurred in the morpheme structure of demonstrative pronouns used to indicate persons and non-persons (cf.: тъ and този, та and тази, то and това, те and тези) are linked to the need to distinguish these pronouns from the newly established third-person personal pronouns (той, тя, то, те). This has also resulted in changes to the morpheme struc-ture. The morpheme structure of possessive pronouns, which are etymologically related to personal pronouns, is also a focus of our research due to the specifics of their for-mation. The nuclear morpheme carries the semantics of the personal pronominal forms, while the suffixes are derived from the paradigm of relational adjectives.