Dimitrina Ignatova-Tzoneva

Dimitrina Ignatova-Tsoneva (born 30 July 1949) is a Bulgarian linguist and phonetician who teaches at the Ruse University in Bulgaria. She has more than 80 publications in the field of contrastive linguistics, foreign language teaching, psycholinguistics, phonology, Bulgarian folklore and ethnology.
==Biography==
Dimitrina Ignatova-Tsoneva was born in the village of Dzhulyunitsa near Veliko Tarnovo in 1949. She gained her master's degree in Bulgarian Philology at the St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo in 1972 and was then pronounced Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics by the Specialised Linguistic Science Council at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1988. 
Tzoneva was awarded the degrees of Associate Professor and Professor in General and Contrastive Linguistics in 1992 and 2012, respectively.
She has been teaching at the Department of Bulgarian Language, Literature and Art at the Ruse University since the early 1980s. In 1998, she was appointed Chair of the Department, a position she has had ever since.
From 1980 to 1989, she was deputy editor-in-chief of the student newspaper in Ruse. She is currently Head of the Philology Unit of the Union of Scientists in Ruse.
==Working areas==
Ignatova-Tsoneva has authored five textbooks, three teaching and eight learning aids and has also penned a plethora of other publications, including monographs, scientific and research articles, etc. 
Her main interests include computer-assisted learning, Bulgarian phonology, sociolinguistics and ethnology. 
11 of her research articles have been published on ResearchGate.. At the same time, the Publication System of Ruse University lists some 50 publications made by Tzoneva since the year 2000.
Since the late 2000s, she has established herself as one of the primary opponents of Nikolai Trubetzkoy's theory of phonetics and its application in Bulgarian phonology, with 12 research articles and monographs on the subject, including
* Another Look at the Palatalisation of Bulgarian Consonants (2008);
* Are Bulgarian Consonants Palatal or Palatalised? (2009);
* Comparison of the Degree of Consonant Palatalisation in Contemporary Slavic Languages (2010); 
* System of Phonemic Functional Variants in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian (2014);
* On a Revision of the Stance on Bulgarian Phonemic Inventory's Make-Up (2018); 
* Modelling the Phonemic Inventory of Contemporary Standard Bulgarian (2019), etc. etc. 
Based on the historical development of the Bulgarian language, the very limited positional distribution of palatalised consonants and their moderate to weak degree of palatalisation, she has argued against the existence of separate palatal phonemes in Bulgarian.
In her opinion, the only true palatal Bulgarian phoneme is ⟨й⟩ , while all other cases of palatalisation can be reanalysed as C-j-V (consonant-glide-vowel) clusters.
She considers the current clutter of 39 consonants in Bulgarian phonology to hamper language learning in both children and migrants, impeede the development of speech recognition software and complicate the pickup of standard Bulgarian by Western Bulgarian speakers.
Category:1949 births
Category:Bulgarian people
Category:Linguists
Category:Phoneticians
Category:Professors