Essays on Comparative Syntax of Bulgarian and Russian

This article presents a review of the book by a major Bulgarian researcher of Russian, professor of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" Alla Gradinarova, whose scholarly interests focus mainly on the contrastive syntax of Bulgarian and Russian. In the new monograph, the author concentrates largely on the points of divergence in these languages stemming from their typological differences: passive voice and syntactic impersonality, word order, communicatively marked phrasal templates, various types of multi-clause structures ranging from verbal adverb phrases to complex and asyndetic sentences, etc. The contrastive analysis of the language data helps to reveal significant characteristics of the studied phenomena. This allows the use of the obtained results and data not only in typology and contrastive linguistics, but also in the study of the Russian language, as the approach of the author in her studies is based on a profound analysis of Russian data. The book constitutes a major contribution to studies in contrastive syntax of Slavic languages.