BULGARIAN VERNACULAR ACCENT PECULIARITIES IN DIALECTOLOGICAL DESCRIPTIONS FROM THE NATIONAL REVIVAL PERIOD

The following article examines the accentual peculiarities in the Bulgarian vernacular from the second and third quarters of the 19th century as described in the dialectological publications from the same period. Bulgarian 19th-century writers go beyond the field area of recognizing and analyzing the phonetic nature of the Bulgarian dynamic accent and its effect on vowels and comment on a number of phonetic processes and phenomena, regarded as a result of the functioning of the word stress. They discuss the reduction of unstressed vowels in Eastern Bulgarian dialects, set out the Yat rule, and draw attention to the connection between Yat mutation and word stress. In their publications a number of accentual peculiarities are revealed, such as: the fixed secondary and tertiary stress in some Southwestern Bulgarian dialects, shifting the stress from the root syllable to the flexion in the definite forms of disyllabic words – a special phonetic feature in the mass of Southwestern and Rup Bulgarian dialects. In their attempts to present the diversity of the spoken language and to conceptualize it as a cultural value and a linguistic source, they present hundreds of examples which visualize the variety of local pronunciations, as well as the word-stock of the entire Bulgarian language. Their work is a valuable contribution both to the history of the Bulgarian vernacular and to the history of the Bulgarian dialectology from the 19th century.