Some Notes on p(e)re-Reduplication in B ulgarian and U krainian: A Corpus-based Study (2022)

Abstract: 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.

## introduction the proto-indo-european root *per 'take, carry across or through' @xcite gave rise in slavic to a preverb with a fundamental spatial meaning as well as a variety of derived meanings, all related to crossing a boundary or surpassing a degree, with the potential of combining with parts of speech other than the verb, too, as an elative marker: пр -ѣ expresses the idea of going beyond, surpassing: пр ити ѣ 'to cross, get over', пр ст пити ѣ ѫ 'to transgress', пр ли ти ѣ ꙗ 'to overflow'; and of transporting, transforming: пр селити ѣ 'to resettle', пр о ѣ бразити 'to transfigure'. at the same time it is an intensifier which adjoins to adjectives, to nouns: препог б ль ꙑ ѣ 'complete perdition, πανωλεθρία' and to verbs: пречюдив сѧ 'being excessively astonished, περθαυμάσας ὑ '. @xcite these meanings persevere, by and large, in the contemporary slavic languages. the details vary. in bulgarian the recursive mode of action ('redo, do again or in a new way') appears to be the most prominent among the ones marked by the preverb пре-, followed by the majorative-resultative (or intensive: 'do to a degree higher than the norm') and the transgressive ('do across an area'), with 96, 67 and 41 examples listed in (ivanova 1974: 49ff), respectively. bulgarian пре-does not mark the resultative-pancursive-distributive mode of action ('do upon all available objects'), which is often expressed by its ukrainian cognate пере- @xcite . on the other hand, in ukrainian the inherited preverb пере-cedes the elative function almost entirely to the borrowed prefix пре- @xcite , which operates mainly on adjectives and adverbs. it is also noted @xcite that пере-tends to denote motion across and above, contrasting with the similar preverb про-, which indicates motion through the inside of an object, and this motivates its further evolution to a pancursive, majorative (intensive) and recursive marker. the bulgarian prefix пре-and the ukrainian пере-play a key part in a phenomenon which we will call p(e)re-reduplication. it consists of the use in close succession of two cognate words (as a rule of the same part of speech and in the same grammatical form), the second of which is formed with the prefix пре-or пере-(in the two languages respectively), where the first has no prefix or has another. in general this pursues a rhetorical effect: a concept is expressed twice with added emphasis the second time, which results in intensification: (1) [bg] но тези роти вече, както личи, не са формирани от патилите и препатили войници, които текат закърпени от болниците (o. honchar, the standard bearers) 'but now these companies are evidently not composed of those seasoned and overseasoned soldiers who stream, patched, from the hospitals.' (2) [uk] це досить відверта посмішка жінки, яка бачила-перебачила. (b. raynov, don't make me laugh) 'this is the rather brazen grin of a woman who has seen, and seen a lot'. the device is especially typical of the language of folklore and of colloquial speech influenced thereby. it may be tempting to say that this is simply the same construction serving the same purpose in two closely related languages. but this does not mean that its use is identical: there may be differences in the lexical categories most commonly involved, the details of the morphology and the syntax and perhaps other parameters. such differences can only be established or disproven with the help of evidence drawn from corpora. in this paper we present the results of a comparative study of p(e)re-reduplication in bulgarian and ukrainian based on material from a parallel bilingual corpus. ## on the corpus the bilingual bulgarian-ukrainian corpus (cub) @xcite consists of parallel texts available in electronic libraries or obtained by us from paper editions through scanning, optical character recognition and error correction by ad hoc software tools and by hand. for this reason, the corpus is composed of fictional works, mostly of novels, which dominate in such sources. because original and translated parallel texts for ukrainian and bulgarian are hard to come by, especially in online-accessible computer-readable form, we also use bulgarian and ukrainian literary translations from other languages as corpus material. the version of cub used in this research includes eleven sectors, each of which covers parallel bulgarian and ukrainian texts with the same original language: ## the results a total of 130 instances of p(e)re-reduplication in one or both languages were found in the corpus, including 48 in bulgarian only, 19 in both bulgarian and ukrainian and 63 in ukrainian only. we disregarded most occasions of преreduplication of adjectives or adverbs in bulgarian, because we are interested in comparing bulgarian пре-to its regular etymological counterpart in ukrainian, which is пере-, and for this particular purpose, as was said above, ukrainian tends to also use пре-. ## conclusions the constructions are similar indeed, but when it comes to actual use, they differ in many points, as we have seen: the parts of speech involved most commonly (predominantly verbs in bulgarian and nouns more often -and exclusively, pronouns and a separable category of invectives -in ukrainian), the interpretation of the prefix (intensive mostly in bulgarian, transgressive etc. in ukrainian), the derivational models (a distinctive prefix on the first item being more typical of ukrainian), the grammatical link between the two items (with strong preference for a conjunction in bulgarian). these can be explained in part by the presence of the borrowed prefix пре-in ukrainian, which has relieved пере-of some of its functions, especially in the literary language. but since we work with fiction, and mostly with translated texts, there is an