Competing verbal constructions with functional TAKE in Bulgarian

This paper discusses the preliminary results of an online acceptability judgments questionnaire on some Bulgarian verbal periphrases featuring the functional verb vzemam ‘take’. The study was conceived to fill a gap in the literature about functional TAKE in Bulgarian, which has been known in previous work since Sandfeld (1900) but is still rather scarce and unsystematic. Three TAKE+V2 constructions are identified: i) a Multiple Agreement Construction featuring the connector da (TAKE daMAC); ii) a MAC featuring ˇce (TAKE ˇceMAC); iii) Pseudo-Coordination (of the type TAKE + i ‘and’ + V2). The participants are 157 native speakers (112 F, 45 M) with an age range of 18-80 (M = 43.63; SD = 13.92). The results of the questionnaire confirm the presence and the productivity of these constructions with functional TAKE in present-day Bulgarian. Moreover, they show that these constructions all share a monoclausal structure, but with some structural differences: V1 in the TAKE MACs is mainly restricted to the past tense, and V2 only occurs in the present, while in the iPseCo V1 and V2 share TAM features and can appear both in the present and in the past. From a semantic point of view, TAKE daMAC specializes for inchoativity, while TAKE ˇceMAC for mirativity. The iPseCo seems to be able to convey both meanings, but it is least preferred than the TAKE MACs.