Abstract
<jats:p>The article examines the syntactic and semantic properties of the manipulative predicate оставям in various semantic realisations, ranging from causative-permissive usage (‘allow, enable someone’) to inaction (‘allow an undesirable situation to hap-pen’). A defining feature of such a verb as a causative permissive is that it requires a да-clause complement. Diagnostic tests for syntactic control reveal non-standard be-haviour of this predicate in comparison to typical manipulative verbs, raising the ques-tion of whether the object element in the surface structure satisfies the criteria for a semantic object of the matrix predicate. The paper argues that, although Bulgarian, as a language of the Balkan Sprachbund, lacks infinitive clauses, да-clauses in certain uses exhibit infinitive-like semantic and syntactic properties, which allows for their analysis in terms of control and raising.</jats:p>