FROM BALAN TO CHOMSKY – THE FIRST STEPS OF YORDAN PENČEV IN THE BULGARIAN SYNTAX

The paper discusses how Yordan Penčev, the pioneer of the Bulgarian generative syntax, bridged the ideas of Alexander Teodorov-Balan’s native formal school with those of Noam Chomsky’s – the representative of the American generative-transformational grammar. Penčev established such connections in his first publications ever (1953, 1958), thus strengthening the thread of the Bulgarian syntactic formalism, despite the obstructions of the totalitarian period. The text focuses on the core of Balan’s ideas, as commented by Penčev in his first two publications, such as distinction between lexical notion and syntactic meaning, case as a semantic category, classification of pronouns based on syntactic criteria, and positing a prepositional phrase as a full-fledged member of the constituent structure. Further on, the paper compares the ideas commented by Penčev in those early publications with the corresponding ones in the early Chomsky’s works (1957), whereby strong similarity is shown. Finally, the mentioned ideas are compared with the key words in the titles of Penčev’s subsequent publications until 1972. The comparison results show that the key issues of Balan, interpreted in Chomskyan light, turn out to have been programming for the early period of Yordan Penčev in general. By way of affirming selected Balan's formal ideas in the Bulgarian linguistics, Penčev opened the way for creative borrowing and development of the then dominant American generative ideas.