The Extension of Monoconsonantal Prepositions in Bulgarian

Prepositions с /s/ ‘with’ and в /v/ ‘in’ are the only two monoconsonantal prepositions in Bulgarian. They both undergo a process of extension in certain contexts, resulting in the allomorphs със /səs/ and във /vəv/, respectively. The rule for standard written Bulgarian states that each preposition doubles when followed by a phoneme with the same place and manner of articulation (Pashov 1999.) It has long been acknowledged, however, that in spoken Bulgarian both prepositions can be extended in all sorts of contexts in addition to the ones captured by that rule (Pashov 1999: 247.) No systematic research has so far been conducted on the variation of monoconsonantal preposition extension in Bulgarian, but this paper is a first step on that path. Using a variationist approach, I collected and analysed almost fifteen hours of recorded speech from four Bulgarian speakers. The analysis showed that there is a certain probabilistic pattern to the two prepositions surfacing in their extended form in different phonological contexts, mostly dependent on the phonotactics of Bulgarian. Most striking, however, was the finding of a markedness effect on variation, which is not often reported in sociolinguistic research: the phonological rule for preposition extension applies at a high rate to prevent the prepositions from undergoing voicing assimilation and thus surfacing in a more marked form. The paper also touches upon other issues relating to the nature of these prepositions in Bulgarian that could open up some interesting avenues of research on speech planning, gradient well-formedness, and historical morphology.