BRIDGING ENGLISH AND BULGARIAN INTENSIFIERS AND ADJECTIVES

It is perfectly natural that users of English and Bulgarian alike find some combinations of intensifiers and adjectives possible while others sound too strange to be used. The paper deals with the constraints that govern the collocation of intensifiers and adjectives in English and in Bulgarian and proves that these restrictions are predictable and lie in conceptualisations of both constituents. What is more, the study proves that the same criteria that govern the classification of English intensifiers into paradigms of similar degree are valid for their Bulgarian translation equivalents. The same is demonstrated for the English adjectives and their Bulgarian counterparts. As a result, the study maps the similarities between the way English and Bulgarian collocations are formed and provides working, trustworthy models for classification of Bulgarian adverbs and adjectives.