Varia: On ‘speaker ghosting’ and the ‘sequence of tense and mood’ rule in the bulgarian language

The analysis of sentences taking part in the semantico-syntactic ‘X said that [content of that]’ schema, in the second part of which verb forms in all nine Bulgarian tenses are used, demonstrates that five of the types of sentences obtained are non-grammatical, and four are grammatical. In the main cases, with the aorist and the imperfect, which are witness-forms, non-grammaticality is due to speaker ghosting, a phenomenon which has been revealed by the author in previous publications. Non-grammaticality with the future in the past and the pluperfect is due to the fact that the verb forms have non-cancelable content, and not because they are witness-forms, as claimed by some authors. The main conclusion of the study, in contrast to previous conceptions in Bulgarian grammars and in Bulgarian linguistics in general, is that the Bulgarian language has a ‘sequence of tense and mood’ rule.