Scientific linguistic networks between Bulgaria, Germany and the US


The proposed research focuses on the crucial cultural role of German linguistics for the transfer of Generative Grammar ‒ the most popular grammatical framework world-wide (Chomsky 1957, 1965) ‒ from the USA to Bulgaria. Although Generative Grammar had to cross the Iron Curtain, its beginning was successfully laid with the involvement of both West and East German linguists and universities in the 1960s and carried on in the next decades.
The basic hypothesis is that Bulgarian Generativism occurred as a result of intellectual interactions and cultural influences on its indirect way from the original source. The study assumes that cultural mediation is no less significant than cultural production and therefore it deserves special attention. Moreover, in the case of Generative reception, the mediation actually established the filed, as German-mediated generative research in Bulgaria occurred more than a decade earlier than the direct American-Bulgarian transfer. Moreover, it was not a passive transfer but a linguistic interaction that enhanced the model by core ideas from German linguistics.

Principal investigators
Voß, Christian Prof. Dr. (Details) (South Slavic Languages and Cultures)

Financer
Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung

Duration of project
Start date: 03/2020
End date: 07/2020

Last updated on 2022-07-09 at 17:07