Modern Bulgarian shares a conditional mood with the other Slavic languages, but it also has developed a future-in-the-past tense which is structurally analogous to many Western European languages’ category traditionally called a conditional mood in their grammars. The distinction between these two forms is sometimes elusive and can be difficult for native speakers of Slavic languages who are learning Bulgarian. In this paper we consider the uses of the Bulgarian conditional mood and future-in-the-past tense in a parallel corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian text, examining the corresponding wording in Ukrainian, where the conditional mood is supplemented by modal verbs, and discuss the breadth of choices open to translators when working in each direction.

We present a comparative study of p(e)re-reduplication in Bulgarian and Ukrainian, based on material from a parallel corpus of bilingual texts. We analyse all occurrences found in the corpus of close sequences and conjunctions of two cognate words, the second of which features the intensive and recursive prefix pre- (Bulgarian) or pere- (Ukrainian). We find that in Bulgarian this construction occurs more frequently with finite verb forms, and in Ukrainian with participles and nouns. There is also a correlation with the mode of action denoted by the prefix: in its intensive meaning it turns up more often in Bulgarian, in its recursive meaning in the two languages equally, and in Ukrainian there are more occasions where it cannot be identified as either intensive or recursive. Finally, in both languages instances of p(e)re-reduplication are most common, by a wide marge, in texts with Ukrainian originals.

We present an experiment in using a corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian parallel texts for the automatised construction of a bilingual lexicosemantic network representing the semantic field of BREAD. We discuss the extraction of the relevant material from the corpus, the production of networks with varying parameters, some issues of the interpretation of these networks, and possible ways of making them more accurate and informative.

Feminitives are formed and used in all Slavic languages, but the productivity of their formation and the intensity of their use are not the same everywhere. They are often subject to various intralinguistic and extralinguistic restrictions. In this paper we present a study of feminitives based on a parallel Bulgarian– Ukrainian corpus, with a focus on those occasions on which a feminitive in one language corresponds to a masculine (rarely neuter) noun in the other. The experiment shows that Bulgarian uses feminitives with considerably greater regularity than Ukrainian does, and we discuss the semantic classes of nouns that fail to form feminitives most often and the efect of the source language in translated text and of the author’s and translator’s individual preferences.

The combination of the meanings ‘while’ and ‘until’ in a single lexeme and the use of expletive negation with the latter meaning are widespread phenomena that are a rich source of research problems. In this paper we present a comparative bilingual Bulgarian and Ukrainian corpus-based study of several conjunctions that share these two meanings. We discuss the difference in the frequency of expletive negation in the two languages, the use of až ‘even, all the way’ in Ukrainian and the impact of the original language in translated texts.

This paper presents a comparative bilingual corpus-based study of the use of several frequent temporal adverbs and adverbial expressions (‘always’, ‘sometimes’, ‘never’ and their synonyms) in Bulgarian and Ukrainian. The Ukrainian items were selected with the aid of synonym dictionaries of words and of set expressions, the corpus was used to identify their most common Bulgarian counterparts, and the frequencies of the correspondences were compared and scrutinised for possibly informative regularities.