This paper analyses the Hungarian and Croatian translations of a short excerpt from Werbőczy’s Tripartitum. The apropos is the fact that J. Polívka had claimed, in an 1909 edition of Tripartitum edited by the Czech legal historian Karel Kadlec, that several extant Croatian translations (and indirectly, Hungarian translations) of the text were erroneous. The comparison of the translations with the original text of the excerpt at hand shows that the translations are not wrong. Rather, both the Hungarian and the Croatian translators, just like the German translator, produced an abridged text for the sake of better intelligibility, so that it can be understood by non-professional readers obviously unfamiliar with legal terminology.
Keywords: Polívka, Pergošić, Balázs Veres, accuracy of translation
In this paper the author argues that the temporal nature of Hungarian van ‘be’ is double-faced, as most Hungarian verbs are. In this perspective, the lexical meanings of van are unbounded, i.e., their aspectual content is imperfective. On the other hand, van is construed in various clausal constructions. The semantic content of the verb is usually adjusted to the clausal meaning via construal; at the same time, the complex meaning of the clause is fundamentally determined by the verb. The Hungarian lexical verb as a process type obtains its full current temporal and aspectual content when grounded, firstly by tense, and is related to further clausal factors (the grammatical object, adverbials and other contextual factors). Clausal construction types conventionalized with the verb van demonstrate the fact that temporality, aspect and tense have close relations on the lexical and clausal level simultaneously.
Keywords: cognitive grammar, epistemic grounding, existence, schematic figure, scope, temporality, (un)boundedness, verb
Nép és nyelv
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
Ottó Herman was a self-taught scientist and scholar of the second half of the 19th century with considerable work in linguistics, too. The influential scholar contributed to the foundation of a number of present-day areas of science/scholarship. His work in linguistics would be classified as “anthropological linguistics” (or “ethnolinguistics”, to use a European term), due, among other things, to his unparalleled fieldwork (unparalleled both in extent and in value); but we can also think of him as a language educator, particularly on account of his contribution to the Language Reform. Furthermore, some of his studies or observations had a distinctly semiotic flavour. This paper discusses and interprets his oeuvre in the above order.
Keywords: Ottó Herman, scientist, ethnographer, ethnolinguist, language reformer, semiotician
Previous studies on the Hungarian colour terms piros and vörös, both denoting ‘red’, have concentrated on one of the following questions: either (1) disambiguating the meanings of the two terms; or (2) their status in Hungarian as basic colour terms. In the present paper we attempt to resolve these issues in one go by a combined approach of corpus and cognitive linguistics. Accordingly, we hypothesize that (1) as vörös had more time to undergo idiomatization, there will be significant differences and systematic trends between the type/token ratios of the two terms; (2) piros is a more generic term used for a larger and looser range of concepts, while vörös is associated with a more limited range of concepts; and (3) piros is mostly used in its primary, literal sense, while vörös tends to be used in a figurative sense. On the basis of a corpus and cognitive linguistic analysis of data extracted from the updated Hungarian National Corpus, we come to the conclusion that vörös is not a basic colour term of Hungarian.
Keywords: basic colour term; piros; vörös; corpus linguistics; cognitive linguistics; conceptual metonymy
The aim of this paper is to present a linguistic approach to intertextuality. Our hypothesis is that intertextual correspondences are functionally significant not only with respect to literary texts but also in the case of everyday texts. In order to explore intertextual correspondences across texts and texts types, the empirical section of the paper analyses commercials collected for the purpose. The theoretical background is provided by linguistic studies of intertextuality on the one hand, and – as is appropriate to the multimodal character of tv/radio spots – by a semiotic approach to texts on the other. For the analysis of commercials representing a variety of text types we apply a model specifically developed for the study of commercials (Stöckl 2003), with the aspect of intertextuality added. The work presented in this paper resulted in observations that are relevant for text linguistics, especially with respect to intertextual correspondences across text types (Klein 2000). In addition to a clear illustration of the possibilities of analysis of intertextuality in a linguistic perspective and the operability of the model chosen, our results may represent a point of departure for future research.
Keywords: intertextuality, typology of forms of intertextuality, text, text type, multimodality, text analysis, advertisement
Szó- és szólásmagyarázatok
Szemle
A Nyelvőr hírei
A Nyelvőr postája