Kam vaprosa za statuta na t.nar. klassifikatori v balgarskija ezik/On the status of the so-called classifiers in Bulgarian

The paper investigates one category of words in contemporary Bulgarian, the socalled classifiers used to denote quantities, which has not received due attention in the literature. It is argued that grammatical elements such as čovek ‘person’, duši ‘persons’, glava ‘head’, as well as suffixes such as the count morpheme on masculine inanimates and the morpheme -ma marking male humans, are appropriate members of the category of classifiers. The paper discusses their morphological and syntactic properties and brings arguments to the effect of the proposed analysis. This category is compared to its counterparts in other languages in which a classifier system has been established even though richer and/or more elaborate than the one of Bulgarian.