Aspect Architecture in Bulgarian: Morphology and Semantics

The present paper addresses the aspectual categories of modern Bulgarian: viewpoint aspect (imperfective vs. perfective), temporal aspect (imperfect vs. aorist), and perfect aspect. More precisely, it concerns their morphological encoding, hierarchical relation, semantic contributions, and interaction. Within a compositional interval-relational framework, the study puts forward a synthesis of existing accounts so as to capture the Bulgarian aspect system as a whole. Among other things, it reveals that ‘aorist’ is a largely illusional grammatical entity, and demonstrates how an interval-relational analysis of the perfect can solve some puzzles associated with the so-called evidential moods.