Appendix:Bulgarian verbs

See also: About Bulgarian

Overview

As is the case in other Slavic languages, Bulgarian verbs have a rich inflection, and derived verbs can be obtained by applying various prefixes and suffixes. The goal of this appendix is to give the reader a high-level, rather than comprehensive and detailed, view of the Bulgarian verb system. It should be sufficient background for understanding the elements of a Bulgarian verb entry on Wiktionary.

Grammatical and morphological categories

Bulgarian verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, mood and evidentiality. Participles (and tense forms using participles) are also inflected for gender and sometimes definiteness.

Verbs have lexical aspect. Furthermore, they can be reflexive, transitive, intransitive or bitransitive. (Bi-)transitive verbs can be in the active or passive voice. There are four auxiliary verbs - съм (sǎm), бъ́да (bǎ́da), би́вам (bívam) and ща (šta).

Person and number

Verbs are inflected for three persons and two numbers (singular and plural), as in English.

Tense

There are nine tenses: present, past imperfect, past aorist, present perfect, past perfect, future, future in the past, future perfect, future perfect in the past. Bulgarian is one of few Slavic languages to retain the use of the aorist in everyday speech.

Mood

There are four (or three, depending on analysis) moods: indicative (unmarked), imperative, conditional and renarrative. Within Slavic languages, the renarrative mood is unique to Bulgarian and Macedonian. Some authors treat it as part of the evidential system, rather than a separate mood.

Evidentiality

Bulgarian verbs have four evidential forms, reflecting the speaker's attitude towards the source of information or the veracity of the information:

• indicative (unmarked) - witnessed events and things generally known to be true;
• inferential - non-witnessed events that can be inferred from evidence;
• dubitative - non-witnessed events whose veracity is doubted by the speaker;
• renarrative - non-witnessed events reported to the speaker by someone else.

Dictionary conventions

Lemma form

Along with Macedonian, and unlike the remaining Slavic languages, Bulgarian does not have an infinitive. Dictionaries, including Wiktionary, lemmatize Bulgarian verbs using the first-person singular form in the present tense, indicative mood - e.g. "I read", "I walk".

Aspect and quotations

Bulgarian monolingual dictionaries, as well as Wiktionary, indicate a verb's lexical aspect, as well as its aspect "partner" - the verb with the opposite aspect - if one exists. Explanatory dictionaries normally list word senses under the imperfective verb, and the provided quotations may use either the imperfective or the perfective verb in the pair.

Transitivity

Bulgarian monolingual dictionaries indicate the transitivity of verbs directly on the headword. We do it in the title of the conjugation table.