ABSTRACT
Macedonian prove to be most conservative in retaining the rich Common Slavonic system, although both have also innovated in the development of special periphrastic verb constructions to indicate events not directly witnessed by the speaker (preizkazvane), e.g. Bulgarian toj bil peel ‘he was (they say) singing’, cf. toj peeše ‘he was singing’. The aorist and imperfect have been ousted by the originally compound perfect in most Slavonic languages: apart from Bulgarian and Macedonian, these verb forms survive only in Sorbian and in literary Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian. The aspectual opposition between imperfective and perfective has developed in all Slavonic languages (including Bulgarian and Macedonian) into a fully fledged morphological opposition.
