Bulgarian Evidential Forms and Wierzbicka’s NSM

Our focus in this paper is on the semantics of a particular grammatical category of Bulgarian, namely evidentiality. Our starting point is the account of evidentiality in Macedonian and Bulgarian in Wierzbicka (in Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: 1996). We elaborate and expand on this proposal by suggesting semantic formulae for the renarrative, dubitative, inferential, and mirative forms, incorporating Wierzbicka’s universal semantic primitives know and think. Our aim is to provide a stepping stone towards precise intra- and inter-linguistic comparisons.