A FOR~ PROCEDURE FOR BULGARIAN WORD FORM GENERATION 
Elena Paskaleva 
Sofia, Bulgaria 
The generation procedure proposed aims at the modelling 
of the process of verbal and nominal inflexion in Bulgarian. 
As in most of the similar morphological models of inflexional 
languages the procedure uses a comparatively simple mechar~ism 
of description - a comparatively small number of initial 
objects among which onl.y one relation (viz. concatenation) is 
assigned; the transitions generating a separate concrete word 
form (or class of word forms) are determined. 
The procedure includes the following linguistic objects-" 
S = (s I, s2,..., s n )- a set of stems in Bulgarian 
(these can be the stems of dictionary entries in .a sufficient- 
ly full dictionary of Bulgarian or the stems of lexical items 
used by the native speaker in his language behaviour). 
K = (kl, k2, .., k~ - where k i i s a number of an in- 
flexional type. 
G = (g1' g2''''' gp) " where gi is grammatical meaning. 
P = < f1' f2"''' fg) " where fi is an ending. 
T = < tl, t2,... , tr) - where t i is the so called "theme", 
i.e. one of the following elements: a thematic vowel in the 
verbal conjugation, a form-building suffix in the nominal de- 
clension or an extension of the stem in putting an article to 
some masculine adjectives. 
A = < al, a2,... , a s) - where a i is a postpositional 
article. 
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b 
D : (d I, ~, ..., dw} - where d i is an inflexlonal 
suffix. (This deviation from the aim of the model to describe 
only the processes of inflexlon is conditioned by the dual 
nature of the participle as a part of the verbal paradigm 
and at the same time following the adjectival declension. 
This is the reason why, as we shall see below, it is generat- 
ed in two phases: "verbal stem-~ stem of a particlple" and 
"stem of a participle ~ word form of a participle". In the 
first phase elements participate belonging %o the verbal in- 
flexion (the thematic vowel typical for the inflexional type 
of the verbal stem), and in the second, elements belonging 
to the adjectival declension. 
The elements of S csm be mapped onto K. This map is 
many-one. The element correspondlng to s is denoted by k s- 
Between the elements of G and F, G and T, G and D, G 
and A correspondences exist which must be assigned in a 
table because of special language reasons - the ambiguity of 
the morphological elements and the different inflexion of one 
grammatical category. 
For an initial symbol (S) of the generation procedure, 
some s i is accepted accompanied by the corresponding ksl and 
the set G s c G. By the concatenation of s with t, d, a and 
f (the sequence of operations can be followed on the transit- 
ion network) the followin 6 linguistic objects are obtained: 
a. as intermediate states of the generation procedure: 
ST - extended stem, i.e. "stem + theme" (s i t~)~ 
SD - derlvatlonal stem, i.e. "stem (+eventually a 
theme) + word forming suffix" (s i t~ d m or 
s I ~). 
b. as final states of the generation procedure: 
SP - word form! /-~ 
S~ - word form with a postpositional article (SF ar). 
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a 
In a most general form, the model for. generation of 
Bulgarian word forms may be represented by the following very 
simple transition network: 
d 
The arcs of the network are marked with such an element of 
the sets T, D, F and A which is the second argument of the 
oonoat enation. 
There being two final states is the result of the agglu- 
tinative character of the Bulgarian postpositive article, ad- 
Joined to an already generated word form. Deviation from the 
principles of agglutination we have in the direct transitions 
S ~ S~ and ST ~ SF A, i.e. the article is adjoined to a stem 
(simple or extended). Such an adJunction we have in: a) putt- 
ing an article to adjectives which in m.sg. have a zero end- 
ing and the article is added to the extended stem. b) adding 
an article to nouns and adjectives ending in masculine with 
iotized vowel (graphically represented by "vowel÷~ ") or 
with consonant. In the first case, the violation of the 
agglunitative character of the article is the ~esult of the 
disregarding of morphonemic dependencies in the model gener- 
ating only strings of letters (otherwise we would have a norm- 
al transition SF ~ S~, i.e.repo -J - repo- J - a). In the 
second case, the direct transition S(ST)- S~ is motivated 
by the linguistic unnaturalness of the resulting solution: 
the zero ending of the articleless masculine nouns and a~Ject- 
ires (final element of the word form) to be preserved also in 
the a~ticled form as an intermediate element (6paT-~ ~6paT-~-a) . 
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An alternative approach allowing to avoid this unnaturalness 
is to assume the identity "stem = word form" in the article- 
less form, i.e. the elimination of the zero ending as an 
element of the declension, which, however, would strongly 
affect the paradi~natio system. 
The choice of concrete values of t, d, f and a for 
each s i is determined by the value of k i and the elements of 
G s assigned in their initial state. 
This network Jointly represents the models of verbal 
and nominal inflexion. Treated separately, the three basic 
generative procedures are realized by the following transit- 
ions: 
Finite forms 
II. I ~ 3 
ParSiclples 
I.A. I ~ 4! B. 4~ 3 or 4~ 3- 5 or 4 - 2 ~ 5 
II.A. I - 2 ~ 4; B. 4~ 3 or 4~ 3- 5 or 4 ~ 2 - 5 
Nouns 
I. I ~ 2 - 3 or I ~ 2- 3- 5 
If. I - 3 or I ~ 3 ~ 5 
III. I ~ 3 or 1 ~ 5 
Adjectives 
I~ 1- 3 or 1 - 3- 5 
II. 1 - 3 or I ~ 2 ~ 5 
III. I ~ 3 or 1 - 5 
The choice of procedures I, II or III within the frame- 
work of the basic generation procedures is determined by the 
elements of G s and the value of k i in the initial state, The 
existence of disjunction in procedures I, II and III for nom- 
inal generation is conditioned by the existence or absence of 
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an "article form" value among the elements of G s. The trans- 
itions A and B of the generating procedure for partiolplem 
are executed sequentially. 
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