Bulgarian edin: The Rise of an Indefinite Article∗

In many languages, the indefinite article emerges from the numeral ONE. In the course of its diachronic development it acquires additional functions such as marking of specificity and genericity. Thus, different functions of indefinite articles can be seen as stages in the process of grammaticalization. This paper examines the use of edin in Bulgarian as a marker of indefiniteness. It shows that it has reached the stage of a specificity marker and is developing the predicative and the generic use. This leads to the conclusion that edin has not yet entirely achieved the stage of indefinite article but merely has the intermediate status, the status of an indefinite determiner. The findings concerning the current functions of edin in this paper lead to a modification of the implicational scale of functions of indefinite articles proposed in the literature.