Bulgarian to Sinhala: an experience need not use the same construction as a deliberate action
Identify the event’s control, not only its actor
Bulgarian verbal grammar and Sinhala volitive-involitive constructions divide information differently. Jany’s study of spoken Sinhala examines how a participant’s control and affectedness relate to case marking and verb choice. A Bulgarian sentence about running, falling or perceiving something therefore needs more than a target dictionary verb: the construction should fit whether the person acts deliberately or undergoes an experience.
The study contrasts maŋ diuw-a, a running statement, with maawə diun-a in an involuntary-running example. These forms illustrate a constructional difference, not a universal rule that every event can be categorized from its English-style verb gloss. For a Bulgarian personal account, establish what the writer says about intention or external circumstances before choosing the corresponding Sinhala pattern.
Bulgarian aspect does not answer the volition question
Bulgarian distinguishes perfective and imperfective verbs, but reaching an action’s endpoint and controlling that action are separate meanings. A completed accident is not thereby a deliberate event. Likewise, a deliberate activity can remain unfinished. Do not treat a Bulgarian perfective form as an automatic trigger for one Sinhala volitional construction.
For a Bulgarian report about an unexpected movement or mishap, preserve both dimensions where the source supplies them: what happened to the event and how the person participated in it. A target may correctly convey past time while changing the involvement of the person. That would alter the report even if the broad action and its result remain recognizable.
A dative expression can identify an experiencer
Jany illustrates maṭə sindu æhe-nəwa for hearing music, with the experiencing participant in a dative construction. Bulgarian чува-style wording should therefore not be used to impose a nominative target pronoun solely because the experiencer appears as the source grammatical subject. The selected Sinhala predicate determines a different grammatical organization.
This is particularly relevant when a Bulgarian passage alternates intentional listening with hearing something happen. The same person may be involved in both, but the relationship to the sound differs. The target should retain that distinction instead of giving every auditory sentence the same noun-case and verb pattern for superficial consistency.
Spoken Sinhala evidence has a defined scope
The cited study explicitly concerns spoken Sinhala and notes that the link between involitive morphology and nonvolitional meaning is not absolute. Its evidence must not be generalized into a rigid rule covering every target verb or every written register. Check the chosen construction rather than attaching a semantic label based on one suffix alone.
Bulgarian also supplies person information through its finite verbs where the subject is omitted, while the studied Sinhala variety has no corresponding verbal agreement. Participant reference may therefore need explicit reconstruction in the target. In this direction, identify the person, the event’s completion and the person’s control separately. Those decisions allow Sinhala to express the same experience without forcing it into the Bulgarian source’s grammatical arrangement.
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