The Case for Genitive Case in Bulgarian

In this paper, we argue, differently from both traditional and modern analyses, that Bulgarian possessive clitics are underlyingly either dative or genitive despite the morphological merger between these two Cases in the language. To this effect, we advance several arguments from possessor constructions, nominalizations, argument extraction, distribution of clitics in contexts involvong dative and genitive cases. The conclusions reached in the paper may have important consequences not only for a better understanding of case relations and their structural properties but also for the study of case syncretism (the genitive-dative merger) in the history of Bulgarian as a Balkan language.