Nyelvművelés
The concept of “motherland” in the Hungarian linguistic image of the world
“Motherland” is the name or call word of a cognitive domain that has become fixed in the Hungarian linguistic image of the world in terms of a view of the world that is characteristic of Hungarian language and culture. The internal taxonomy of that concept is made up of six domains referred to by the following lexemes: haza ‘one’s own country’, hon (otthon) ‘home(land)’, anyaország ‘mother country’, anyaföld ‘mother earth’, szülőhaza ‘land of birth’, szülőföld ‘native soil’. The basic dimension of the Hungarian concept of “motherland” is space. In the centre of that space stands the “house” that can be taken to be the prototype, in the sense of ancient model, of “motherland”.
On agreement governed by collective nouns
This paper discusses the issues of grammatical agreement governed by collective nouns on the basis of a data set collected between 1992 and 2002. The author does not try to treat the emerging issues in their entirety: his attention is focused on errors, peculiarities, and curious examples. The analysis covers cases of clause-internal agreement as well as those of agreement spanning clause boundaries.
Nép és stílus
Features of literary trends as a possible principle of investigation (The history of literary trends as an applied discipline)
The aim of this study is to present “stylistic features” of literary trends as a new principle of stylistic investigation. In this view, these features serve as a reflector by means of which stylistic phenomena can be put in a new light. In other words, they represent new principles for the inquiry into stylistic facts belonging to various branches of stylistic. By way of this inquiry, we can deepen our understanding, we can penetrate into their latent “content”, and we can complete our knowledge of them obtained so far by other criteria, in terms of other approaches. For instance, by introducing such “features” into the stylistic analysis of a literary work, our knowledge of the analysed work is enriched, and this “addition” contributes to a better understanding and to a more profound interpretation and evaluation of it.
A folkloristic/textological study of pre-election circular SMSes
Initially SMS, the short text-containing message sending system of cellular phones, served the purpose of personal communication. Nevertheless, as mobile phones have been catching on, the SMS has started to function in other ways (e.g., as replacement for postcards, news service, and even as a means of mass communication). Unexpectedly, SMS was given an important role during the 2002 parliamentary elections in Hungary. Between the two election rounds, campaigning was also going on via SMS (circular SMSes). Nearly all the 300 important messages of the two weeks have been documented. The results of the present research on election SMSes are as follows: (a) formerly observed phenomena of folklore or folklore-like texts have received a new medium; (b) the new type of spoken language usage has been strengthened; (c) SMS as a medium has been extended and put to new types of uses; (d) it follows the organisation of public mass communication; (e) it differs from the private language use of SMSes; (f) colourful linguistic humour and political talk in terms of experiences have appeared; (g) the SMS led to a total election campaign and it may have had an effect on the election results.
Nép és nyelv
Sulyom, zsurló, csomolya
The author lists popular names for sulyom ‘water-chestnut’, zsurló ‘horsetail’, and csormolya ‘Melampyrum arvense’, and analyses the motivations and circumstances among which the various names arose.
Nyelv és iskola
Phonetics education in Europe
The major aim of Socrates Thematic Network on „Speech Communication Sciences” is to reflect on future directions in phonetics education and to initiate activities that promote desirable and needed developments. The Thematic Network started its work in 1996 and first made an analysis of the current state of education in Speech Communication Sciences in Europe. Building on this work, the working groups of the network made proposals on the outline and contents of academic studies in Phonetics, Spoken Language Engineering and for the Speech Communication component in Speech and Language Therapy. This paper presents (i) the most important results of the survey which summarized 89 institutions’ answers on aims, elements and tools of study (etc.) as well as (ii) the proposals for phonetics education with linguistics-oriented aims.
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
The place of appositive constructions among syntactic patterns
This paper tries to find the place of appositive constructions in the overall syntactic structure of present-day Hungarian. Capitalising on the fact that Magyar grammatika [Hungarian Grammar], a recent university textbook first published in 2000, does not define appositions as a kind of attributes (as was usually done beforehand), the author looks at the various types of appositions: qualifying, attributing, and identifying ones, as well as appositive adverbs, and concludes that appositions – due to their inflectional endings – play the same syntactic role in sentences as their host nouns do. On the other hand, appositive constructions cannot be taken to be coordinative constructions since their constituents normally refer to the same entity in two different ways, hence they are in a close-knit relationship with each other, termed an appositive-identifying relation here. They constitute a third kind of syntactic constructions alongside subordinative and coordinative ones.
A grammatical study of participial figura etymologica
This paper is a sequel to the author’s earlier ‘A grammatical study of infinitival figura etymologica’; its aim is to conduct a detailed syntactic (part-of-speech-related) investigation of participial stem doublets (i.e., constructions of the várva vár ‘look forward with impatience’ [literally: wait waiting], kérve kér ‘implore’ [literally: ask asking] type). Given the fact that it is exclusively in the case of such stem doublets that ‘participial adverbs of degree’ are known in the relevant literature, the author approaches the construction at hand with a rather critical attitude. She shows to what extent the adverbial participle in such constructions meets the general requirements of that part of speech and in what ways it departs from them. She then comes to the conclusion that such forms do not meet the criteria of subordinate (hence of adverbial) constructions either semantically or syntactically. In view of the relatively infrequent occurrence of the construction, she backs up her arguments with selected examples taken from works of fiction. Finally, by analogy with ‘set phrases’, she suggests that a new concept, that of ‘set forms’, be introduced.
Written language as the object of acquisition
This paper analyses the issue of language acquisition in a psycho- and sociolinguistic perspective, discussing its behaviourist, maturational and constructionist theories. All these approaches share the feature that, with respect to language acquisition, they take both an innate language faculty and a set of environmental effects into consideration. The various approaches mainly differ in terms of the proportions of influence they attribute to each of these components. Another shared feature is that most approaches usually restrict the issue of language acquisition to the acquisition of the spoken form of one’s native language. However, evidence is accumulating that, due to environmental factors, a simultaneous acquisition of the written and spoken versions of the mother tongue cannot be excluded, either. This paper presents detailed data concerning the linguistic development, with respect to written language, of a child between the ages of 2 and 4. The phenomenon analysed here, the pre-school acquisition of the written form of a child’s native language, raises not only theoretical problems but also those of a very practical nature in connection with mother tongue education.
Szemle
A Nyelvőr hírei
A Nyelvőr hírei