The monitoring of speech processes
There is substantial evidence that speakers monitor their speech while speaking. This allows them to correct their speech errors. Self-monitoring does not only work on the basis of acoustic feedback (overt monitoring), but also during speech planning prior to motor execution (covert monitoring). The question arises what happens if only covert monitoring is available because the speaker is forced to speak under noisy conditions. In this case we may assume that the incidence, types and corrections of speech errors would be different from those found under typical speech conditions. Directed spontaneous speech samples were recorded under two conditions: “no noise” and “noise present” where human conversational babble was used as noise. 30 young subjects were asked to summarize two stories presented to them acoustically, one under noisy and the other one under silent conditions. Our data confirmed that some factors remained unchanged at the group level (speech sample durations, speech tempi and number of words used in the speech samples) while others showed significant differences depending on whether the background was noisy or silent. The frequency and types of disfluencies, as well as the correction time of some types of disfluencies, supported the claim that operations of covert monitoring may be affected by the lack of overt monitoring. The relations, results and assumed functional divisions of both types of monitoring are discussed in the paper.
Keywords: self-monitoring, speech in noise, corrections
The problems of transliteration and use of personal names of Subcarpathian Hungarians
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One-third of the people whose mother tongue is Hungarian live outside Hungary, in the neighbouring countries. Hungary often has (official) relations with Hungarians who are not Hungarian citizens. In the process of official administration it often causes a problem to establish the identity of these Hungarians. It is a problem, for example, to decide which name the authorities should consider in the case mentioned above: (a) the traditional Hungarian name (with which the person identifies himself; e.g., Végs. Sándor); or (b) the official name in the passport which is the Russified/Ukrainianized form (Vehshe Olexandr).
Keywords: transliteration, personal names, Subcarpathian Hungarians
Nyelv és stílus
The linguistic character of textual material – plus something else… (Sándor Weöres: Via vitae)
Sándor Weöres wrote the poem Via vitae (Path of life) in 1975, at the beginning of his final creative period. The structure of the poem, in the present analyst’s view, is determined by three contrasts: those of spatial vs. temporal dimensions, man-made objects vs. natural phenomena, and personal vs. impersonal approaches. The concrete and abstract semantic planes of the text stand in an allegorical relationship with one another. The poem bears clear signs of an influence of Oriental poetry and philosophy that is characteristic of Sándor Weöres’s whole oeuvre.
Keywords: spatial, temporal, natural, artificial, personal, impersonal, allegory, symbol
Food and drink in the poems of Milán Füst
Since the beginning it has been common knowledge of the reception of Milán Füst’s poetry that ghosts and spirits “[…] frequently talk about food. They eat liver and nut; they eat a lot; even the personated ghost of Autumn eats: he eats green, cold apples […]” (Frigyes Karinthy, 1911). This study enumerates all types of food and drink appearing in the complete oeuvre of the poet. An overwhelming portion of Milán Füst’s poetry describes medieval relations and situations of life. The types of food and drink mentioned recall the habits of nourishment of the (Hungarian) Middle Ages (carrot, bear meat, strudel, wine). Letters from the poet’s childhood and young adulthood testify that he (as the “son of a poor tobacconist’s wife”) perceives the luxury of some people’s eating habits. The diary of his adulthood tells us about his relationship to food and drink.
Keywords: entropy, poetic language, medieval dishes, Milán Füst
Nyelv és iskola
Processes of spontaneous sentence construction by small children
This paper analyses the morphological-syntactic complexity of spontaneous speech by small children aged 4 to 8 in terms of a procedure adapted to Hungarian but not yet standardised, known as developmental sentence scoring (DSS). The issue to be resolved is how a certain level of first language acquisition can be characterised by the quantity and quality of grammatical-syntactic constructions occurring in children’s spontaneous speech. The results suggest that, in the age interval concerned, the grammatical complexity of children’s spontaneous speech does not simply exhibit a linear development with increasing age but the divide between kindergarten and primary school can be traced clearly, and also, two stages of development can be established between first and second year kindergarten pupils and between first and second grade schoolchildren. The results of the present study and their comparison with those of previous similar studies point towards the necessity of the standardisation of the procedure.
Keywords: directed spontaneous speech, developmental sentence scoring (DSS), syntactic complexity, morphological constructions, grammatical vs. ungrammatical sentences, inflectional paradigm, mean length of utterances (MLU), grammatical awareness
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
News texts and translation: The relationship between topical structure and news contents in translated newspaper articles
Topical structure (Lautamatti 1987) in news translation has received little attention despite its stated significance in discourse content (Schneider & Connor 1990) and in producing functionally adequate translations. This study explores how shifts in topical development in translation may influence news contents. Using Lautamatti’s Topical Structure Analysis and Bell’s (1991) Event Structure Model, the paper describes the translation strategies applied in (re)producing the source texts’ topical and event structures in the target language in a corpus of Hungarian–English news texts. Results show that while translators generally preserve the sources’ structure in translation, in some cases significant changes (shifts) also occur. These shifts are claimed to change not only the status of certain pieces of information and event structure, but the contents of the news story as well.
Keywords: news text, topical structure, event structure, genre, shifts of translation
The imperative seen from a pragmatic angle (part one)
This paper uses a large sample of linguistic material to establish the range of speech acts that can be performed in Hungarian by using verb forms involving the mood marker -j, and to explore formal and usage-based characteristics related to their functions. Furthermore, the author intends to contribute to resolving a problem often raised with respect to the syntax of the imperative: whether there is a subjunctive mood in Hungarian, and what its scope is if any. In order to reach those goals, the author clarifies a number of issues pertaining to speech act theory, including the relationship between speech act verbs and performatives and presents specific methods of analysing the individual speech acts. The types of acts she defines as being expressed by the mood marker -j, that is, directive acts, acts midway between directive and expressive ones, impressive-expressive acts, and assertive acts, show that the author relies on Searle’s classification but rejects its strict principles of separation of illocutionary classes, claiming instead that there are also transitional classes unifying features of two or more basic types. By using a pragmatic approach and employing a tripartite set of criteria for telling imperatives and subjunctives apart, the author claims that, in addition to syntactic structures analysed as involving the subjunctive, there are also two-faced structures uniting features of directives (traditionally seen as involving verbs in the imperative) and conjunctives.
Keywords: speech acts, performatives, imperative, subjunctive
The formal modelling of language change
The aim of this review article is to provide a short overview of the literature on the formal modelling of language change. The formal modelling of language change is a rapidly developing research programme situated at the intersection of generative linguistics, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, language acquisition, population genetics and computational and mathematical-statistical modelling. Its research agenda includes such goals as the precise and formal characterisation of linguistic change, the analysis of the relationship between language change and language acquisition, and the exploration of the connections between the speed and character of language change on the one hand and the population dynamics of the language community on the other.
Keywords: computational linguistics, language acquisition, syntax, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, generative linguistics
Szó- és szólásmagyarázatok
Szemle