The beginnings of the history of the Society of Hungarian Linguistics in 1905 - Who constituted the membership of the Society in the first year of its existence?
The author presents a sample of his forthcoming monograph describing the one-hundred-year history of the Society of Hungarian Linguistics. At the beginning of the sample presented here, Kálmán Szily, the president of the Society, emphasises in a writing entitled ‘To our readers’ in the second volume of Magyar Nyelv (1906) that, in the first year after the Society had been established, the number of members and subscribers to the journal considerably increased. The list of members included not only linguists but also literary scholars, historians, and ethnographers. Three linguists living outside Hungary had been elected as honorary members. Recitals and board meetings were held. The author then presents the distribution of the 719 members by place of residence and occupation. All these particulars witness the active contemporary interest taken in the Society of Hungarian Linguistics and its journal Magyar Nyelv. The author also discusses what was meant by the specification ‘Monthly paper of public interest’ displayed on the front cover and the extent to which this specification was substantiated by the practice of the journal.
Keywords: society, the Society of Hungarian Linguistics, Magyar Nyelv (journal), linguistics, early twentieth century
Nyelv és stílus
The effect of digilect on written and spoken communication: A questionnaire study
It is relatively unanimously claimed in both the Hungarian and the international literature that internet communication has specific, genre-independent linguistic properties. The terms used to denote this novel language variety include netspeak, written interactive register, virtual/digital textuality, secondary spoken language, symbolic written language, new spoken language, and virtual written language. The present author uses the term digilect to refer to the language use or language variety of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the broad sense. Digital communication, due to its wide currency and unavoidability in everyday life, as well as for other reasons, certainly affects noncomputer- mediated, traditional written and spoken communication, too. The questionnaire study involving responses given by 647 subjects that is presented here is meant to survey such effects. The main purpose of the study is to explore the interaction between digital communication devices and certain sociological variables (in particular, age and gender); to study the choice of form of communication in terms of partner and situation; to collect some features of digital language use (abbreviations and emoticons); and to document changes in written and spoken communication due to the effect of digital communication. According to the results, the effects of the digital media can be attested primarily at the levels of writing technique and the lexicon.
Keywords: digilect, computer-mediated communication, netlinguistics
Internet troll as an identity assumed in the discourse of political blogs
This paper offers a corpus-based study of a characteristic identity of computer-mediated communication, internet troll, embedded in the framework of cognitive pragmatics and the theory of practice. On the basis of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of two hundred discourse segments created between 2010 and 2012 in forty Hungarian political blogs, the paper discusses positive identity practices on the basis of which some participants actually identify other participants as trolls. Also, it accounts for why there are no negative identity practices by the help of which contributors to political blogs might signal for one another that they do not participate in the actual discourse as trolls.
Keywords: blog, theory of practice, internet troll, cognitive pragmatics, computer-mediated communication
The cognitive semantic explanation of the anaphoric functioning of rhyme
The study proposes an elaborated functional cognitive explanation of rhyme through modelling the semantic grounds of the analysis of rhyme as an anaphoric structure. A textual semantic approach to rhyme – based on Givón’s theory of coherence – is developed from the theoretical and methodological vantage point of cognitive grammar, pointing out, on the one hand, fundamental semantic structures and relations that make the explanation of rhyme as an anaphoric (though not prototypically, nor coreferentially, anaphoric) structure possible; elaborating and detailing, on the other hand, the indirect nature of rhyme as an anaphoric coherence relation. In treating the latter question, the study relies on the theory of frame semantics, too. The presupposition of the cognitive semantic explanation of rhyme is to distinguish the concept of anchoring from the concept of grounding, and a general theoretical consequence of the investigation is the reinterpretation of the adoption of procedural knowledge.
Keywords: scaffolding, metonymy, anchoring, grounding, canonical and non-canonical anaphoric structure, conceptual grouping, reference point structure, frame, procedural and declarative knowledge
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
The image of heart in Hungarian and Polish phraseology
The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the linguistic image of the notion of heart in Hungarian and Polish phraseology, with special emphasis on the types of conceptualization. It becomes possible to compare the content of the cognitive base referred to by the word heart across domains. In a majority of relevant domains, the cognitive bases referred to by the lexeme heart exhibit extensive overlap, though in certain cases, in addition to full equivalence, language-specific features may also appear within the same conceptualization, signalled by diverse metaphorical expressions. Also, the metaphors target of conquest and food only occur in Polish examples. The conceptualizations of the two languages differ in another respect, too: in Polish, but not in Hungarian, the intensive operation of the heart is described by various similes.
Keywords: the concept of heart, Hungarian and Polish phraseology, the linguistic image of the world, metaphors and metaphoric expressions, conceptualization, cognitive base, comparison
Szó- és szólásmagyarázatok
Szemle
A Nyelvőr hírei