A syntactic construction of marked stylistic value, which is typical for the seventeenth- and the eighteenth-century early modern Bulgarian damaskini, appears in both Paisii’s au- tograph of Slavo-Bulgarian History and the seventeenth-century Lovech damaskin: the use with nouns of a pronoun with the stem он- in pre-position, possibly accompanied by an attributive modifier. In some cases, its meaning is identification (emphasized individualization) with the referent mentioned in the previous context. Due to its semantic similarity with the modern Bulgarian definite article in the seventeenth-century Koprivshtitsa damaskin, L. Miletich described it as an “article in pre-position”. In Slavo-Bulgarian History (and its Kotel copy) the construction has a sufficiently strong presence (about 25 tokens) – both in the historical narrative and in Paisii’s original parts of the text – which presents an interesting moment of continuity between the language and style of the first revivalist and the modern Bulgarian literature from the pre-Revival times.
Key words: pronoun он-, “article in pre-position”, literary and linguistic continuity, Zograf autograf of Slavo-Bulgarian History, vernacular damaskini.
