This paper explores factors which appear to have been relevant in the decisions writers of a particular set of late fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century texts made in regard to the degree of explicitness of noun phrases representing the agents and patients (performers and undergoers of the actions) in their sentences. An earlier study proposed a set of ordered derivational rules to account for the typically heavy, intricate sentence structure found in texts representative of what is often referred to as the Evtimiev literary school, centered in Turnovo. This earlier study, with its focus on word order, voice and case assignment, went into some detail on the sentence-level (or in most cases more properly clause-level) structural characteristics pivotal in the resolution of these issues in the syntactic derivation of the sentences in the texts.
The syntactic rules accounting for word order, voice and case assignment were all located relatively early in the derivation. The two final rules proposed in the earlier analysis, on the other hand, are the ones which address the actual form of the agent and patient noun phrases themselves. These two rules, involving pronominalization and subsequent pronoun deletion, while essentially correct, were stated rather vaguely in regard to the conditions under which they are actually applied:
Pronominalization: Nominal elements may be pronominalized if reference is clear.
Pronoun Deletion: Pronouns may be deleted to zero if they are not emphasized (focused) and if reference and relationships among referents and verbal elements are clear.
The current paper revisits pronominalization and pronoun deletion
in these Middle Bulgarian texts. It discusses further these
semantic factors, emphasis and potential for ambiguity, which block one
or both processes. Rather than stopping here and stating that
pronominalization and pronoun deletion