The paper discusses several key concepts related to the development of corpora and reconsiders them in light of recent developments in NLP. On the basis of an overview of present-day corpora, we conclude that the dominant practices of corpus design do not utilise adequately the technologies and, as a result, fail to meet the demands of corpus linguistics, computational lexicology and computational linguistics alike.We proceed to lay out a data-driven approach to corpus design, which integrates the best practices of traditional corpus linguistics with the potential of the latest technologies allowing fast collection, automatic metadata description and annotation of large amounts of data. Thus, the gist of the approach we propose is that corpus design should be centred on amassing large amounts of mono- and multilingual texts and on providing them with a detailed metadata description and high-quality multi-level annotation.We go on to illustrate this concept with a description of the compilation, structuring, documentation, and annotation of the Bulgarian National Corpus (BulNC). At present it consists of a Bulgarian part of 979.6 million words, constituting the corpus kernel, and 33 Bulgarian-X language corpora, totalling 972.3 million words, 1.95 billion words altogether. The BulNC is supplied with a comprehensive metadata description, which allows us to organise the texts according to different principles. The Bulgarian part of the BulNC is automatically processed (tokenised and sentence split) and annotated at several levels: morphosyntactic tagging, lemmatisation, word-sense annotation, annotation of noun phrases and named entities. Some levels of annotation are also applied to the Bulgarian-English parallel corpus with the prospect of expanding multilingual annotation both in terms of linguistic levels and the number of languages for which it is available. We conclude with a brief evaluation of the quality of the corpus and an outline of its applications in NLP and linguistic research.

The paper presents a contrastive analysis of the possibilities of forming inchoative verbs from state predicates in Bulgarian and Russian. The derivational patterns under consideration are much more productive in Bulgarian, but the aspectual properties of predicates impose significant constraints on their combinability with inchoative prefixes in both languages. The possibility of forming an inchoative verb can serve as a reliable diagnostic of a predicate’s membership to a particular ontological category within the semantic typology of predicates.

This article presents ongoing work on the aspectual properties of verb predicates, in particular, the classes of activities and accomplishments. Herein, we focus on incremental theme predicates, starting with consumption verbs as one of the representative subclasses of incremental accomplishments. We explore, in detail, the semantic, referential, quantisation and morphosyntactic properties of incremental Themes and their realisation in Bulgarian. The analysis is based on original empirical data and enabled us to identify the common features shared with widely studied languages such as English and Russian, as well as to establish language-specific features typical for Bulgarian. We hope that our findings may contribute to the study of aspectual classes in a cross-linguistic perspective.