Discourse analysis of an interview about the Bulgarian Pomak wedding ceremony

Abstract

The material of the article is a transcribed interview recording about a wedding ceremony of the middle of the 20th c. with an informant born in 1932, identifying herself as Pomak (Bulgarians- Muslims) and is a native speaker of the Smoljan subdialect of the Bulgarian Rhodope dialect. The relevance of the work is due to the increasing interest of modern humanities to religious minorities and the necessity of developing the most effective methods of field linguistics (based on the dialect material that is quickly disappearing due to social reasons) as well as the novelty of the original material. The article depicts cases of disclosure of information when there are no questions by using the question “what is called y+z?” or the question “do you have a lexeme x?,” by using a clarifying question, or by the question of repeated inquiry; the most frequent one turned out to be “what is called y+z?.” The article also considers the cases of categorical denial of the information proposed in the question, the lack of memories, the cases of a detailed answer or a one-word answer. The most effective questions are “do you have y+z?” and the question of repeated inquiry, resulting in the highest number of positive responses. Due to the dialectic nature of the narrative, the number of questions “do you have a lexeme x?” that aim at concretizing the meaning of a lexeme given by the interviewer was minimal, as the informant mentioned the marked lexis himself without any question being asked.