Case Loss in Pronominal Systems: Evidence from Bulgarian

This paper investigates the loss of morphological case marking on personal pronouns using data from contemporary Bulgarian dialects. Bulgarian underwent massive loss of morphological case marking in the Middle Bulgarian period (twelfth to fifteenth centuries) when a rich system of case inflections inherited from Proto-Slavonic was largely lost (Mirčev 1963: 144–5; Pârvev 1975: 80–98).¹ As a result, Bulgarian lost morphological case on nouns (except for a restricted set of lexemes which preserve residual case forms in some of the dialectal systems; Stojkov 1954). Personal pronouns, however, preserve case distinction, although in a reduced form compared with the original