Bulgarian `deeprichastie'

[Gil Rappaport]

>
>I actually wrote a book on the subject of `deeprichastija' in Russian
>(Slavica Publishers, 1984), so maybe that disqualifies me from commenting,
>but ...
>
>The use of the term `gerund' to render `deeprichastie' has always irritated
>me. It was my impression (confirmed by a glance in the OED) that in Latin
>grammar a `gerund' is a nominal form derived from a verb while retaining the
>latter's government characteristics. Now obviously the constructions of
>different languages don't line up on a one-to-one basis so there ARE
>unavoidable terminological problems, but I submit that this isn't one of
>them. If anything, the term `gerund' should be used, as one SEELANGer
>pointed out, for deverbal nouns, BUT there there may be problems (is the
>verbal government retained? Sometimes yes (in oblique cases: pomoshch' komu,
>upravlenie chem), sometimes not (ubijstvo kogo, ljubov' k chemu). There are
>other syntactic complications here as well ...
>
>But that isn't the question. I am just trying to discredit the use of the
>gerund to render `deeprichastie'. I think that the term `participle' should
>be used for verbal forms retaining essential syntactic characteristics of
>the deriving base which are used in syntactic phrases with a modificational
>function (attributive or adverbial), as opposed to argument function (a
>gerund proper). That leads me to distinguish `adjectival participles'
>(prichastie) and `adverbial participles (deeprichastie). Whence the title of
>the above-mentioned book (`Grammatical Function and Syntactic Structure: The
>Adverbial Participle of Russian'). It makes me sympathetic to the Polish
>terminology mentioned by Prof. Sipka (imieslow = participle, with two types:
>odmienny:nieodmienny or przymiotnikowy:przyslowkowy). This terminology
>reflects the historical aspect noted by someone as well, since the adverbial
>participle is a frozen form of the adjectival participle.
>
>In a sense `verbal adverb' makes this point in less syllables, but loses the
>parallel, since nobody refers to `verbal adjectives'. I just feel that the
>syntactic parallels between `prichastie' and `deeprichastie'  should be
>captured in the terminology, and they should be clearly distinguished from a
>rather distinct nominal construction which is totally absent in Slavic (cf.
>English: `I was shocked by John('s) rejecting my article').
>
>--Gil Rappaport
>   Univ. of Texas at Austin
>
>