Подчинени предикативни единици в английски и български език (Subordinate predication units in English and Bulgarian)

The paper makes an attempt to build a paradigm of all the surface structure expressions of subordinate predication in English and Bulgarian and to study the correlations between them. Special attention is given to the „preposition + noun [+ OBJECT /EVENT]“, in the surface structure of which both the noun and the verb are deleted. The analysed examples come from a corpus of 20 novels by British and American writers and their Bulgarian translations, as well as examples from newspapers translated by informants. The factors regulating the mechanism of generating implicit constructions of this type in English and their functional equivalents in Bulgarian are discussed. While in English this type of construction is fairly frequent, in Bulgarian it occurs with only few prepositions. This difference between the two languages is due 1) to the specific mechanism in English of narrowing the meaning of verbs by means of postfixes and the prepositions of the adverbial phrases modifying them, which is non-existent in Bulgarian, and 2) to the different semantic structure of English prepositions resulting from this.