The Verbal Category of Conditionality in Bulgarian and Its Ukrainian Correspondences

Modern Bulgarian shares a conditional mood with the other Slavic languages, but it also has developed a future-in-the-past tense which is structurally analogous to many Western European languages' category traditionally called a conditional mood in their grammars. The distinction between these two forms is sometimes elusive and can be difficult for native speakers of Slavic languages who are learning Bulgarian. In this paper we consider the uses of the Bulgarian conditional mood and future-in-the-past tense in a parallel corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian text, examining the corresponding wording in Ukrainian, where the conditional mood is supplemented by modal verbs, and discuss the breadth of choices open to translators when working in each direction.