GRAMMATICAL HOMONYMY IN THE SHORT FORMS OF PERSONAL DATIVE AND POSSESSIVE PRONOUNS – A PROBLEMATIC FIELD IN TEACHING BULGARIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The main purpose of teaching Bulgarian to foreign students is to build linguistic competence for daily life communication and for special purposes (academic and professional communication).
The pronominal system of the Bulgarian language - the short forms of personal dative and possessive pronouns, in particular - turns out to be a challenging field to foreign students, as they tend to make a lot of mistakes in the process of learning. The specific pronominal paradigm of the Bulgarian language contains forms that are difficult for foreign students to comprehend, thus they become a focus of interest of the theory of errors in order to develop a methodology for overcoming these difficulties.
The purpose of this article is to present an observation on a grammatical homonymy related to personal dative and possessive pronouns (short forms). This grammatical homonymy objectively leads to errors being made due to overgeneralization at the early stages of acquisition of the Bulgarian language by foreign students. Learners acquire lexical and grammatical competence (a basic parameter comprising lexical, morphological, syntactic and phonological-graphological knowledge) when they begin to recognize and differentiate homonymous word forms. In order to achieve this competence we suggest a system of targeted exercises to identify and compare homonymous forms and their correct use in sentence formation.
Bulgarian grammar books explain this homonymy not so much as an element of the paradigmatic structure of the pronominal case, but as a manifestation of suppletivism that has gone beyond the category of case.
Based on the observations that short personal and possessive pronouns are particles with grammatical function and not meaningful case forms, a rule is deduced, according to which the possessor and the possessed have gender and number form independent from the other word in the word combination.
Of particular importance for foreign students is mastering the word order of the personal dative pronouns, for which rules are presented in tabular form. Foreign students cannot learn and comprehend grammatical homonymy in short pronouns in the Bulgarian language, unless they are also introduced to the rection of basic verbs.
The knowledge of presented grammatical homonymy can be applied by learners to achieve linguistic competence in relation to the Bulgarian language in the general and academic sphere.