Nyelv és iskola
Educational language choice is an issue of minority education that has been repeatedly identified and discussed, and the Moldavian Csángó Hungarian Educational Programme is no exception. Its actors have been confronted by the enduring dilemma of choosing between “Standard” Hungarian and the “Csángó” dialect. As usual, however, the ideology behind the language choice and the practice of it are divergent. Based on an ethnographic study of teaching Hungarian in Moldavia, this paper proposes the reinterpretation of the debate on the ideal choice between languages (majority or minority ones, standards or dialects) in such a way that its starting point is what linguistic-discursive resources are actually used by the participants of classroom interactions. The analysis revolves around the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia, particularly that of “voices”, that also bears on the ideological tensions within classroom interactions between teachers and students. Drawing on the concept of heteroglossia, it is shown that the linguistic ideologies of minority education can be better understood by the multiplicity of voices than by the choice between languages.
language education, minority language, Hungarian in Moldavia, heteroglossia, voice, classroom interaction, monoglot language ideologies
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
The paper explores some major syntactic characteristics of reported-speech subordinate clauses introduced by hogy ‘that’ in a pragmatic framework. In particular, it describes the role of the presence vs. absence of main-clause antecedents like azt ‘that-accusative’ and the conjunction hogy in expressing the speaker’s intentions in directing the listener’s attention. The main thesis is that the speaker’s intention to direct the listener’s attention to the content of what is reported vs. the act of reporting itself can be implemented in four types of constructions: (a) azt + V, hogy; (b) azt + V, Ø; (c) Ø + V, hogy; (d) Ø + V, Ø. The author seeks answers to the questions raised by that four-way choice of implementation with the help of a corpus including a broad range of reporting verbs. As a result, some major pragmatic tendencies of the syntactic architecture of reported speech are revealed, and hitherto unexplored properties of certain groups of verbs (verbs demanding unidirectional attention, performatives, and the classes of achievement verbs vs. accomplishment verbs) are explored.
speech, pragmatics, speakers’ intentions, achievement verb, accomplishment verb
Etymological statistical research on Hungarian has been going on for a century now. Some of that literature is dictionary-based; other research projects are usage-based, that is, they explore proportions of etymological categories of words occurring in various texts. Most usage-based statistical surveys so far have been conducted on written texts. It was only recently that the examination of spoken texts in this respect was started, by the present author. A previous survey of his contrasted three generations of adult speakers with respect to the origins of the word stock they used. The present talk studies the shares of etymological categories in the spontaneous speech of five-year-old nursery-school children with the help of the GABI database. The combination of child language research with etymological research represents a novelty in both areas.
speech database, child language, etymological statistics, lemma statistics
A shared fundamental trait of functionalist approaches to linguistics is the claim that pragmatics is part and parcel of grammar, and is not distinct from other aspects of language description as a discipline, either. Experimental results of recent decades are, however, ambiguous with respect to how close the relationship is between general cognitive and linguistic skills on the one hand and pragmatic competence on the other. This paper is meant to contribute to that debate with an experimental study of the comprehension of speech acts by nursery school children. In order to measure the success of the processing of speech acts, we conducted an experiment involving 68 children between 3 and 6 years of age, as well as 12 adult control subjects. Participants had to watch 18 brief situations in which one of the protagonists expressed a conventional request or dropped an indirect hint. The manner of expression could be either verbal or non-verbal, and verbal requests/hints had further two types: syntactically simplex and complex. Having seen the situation, the participants had to choose the appropriate one from four pictures that matched it. Three standardised tests were used to measure general cognitive and linguistic skills (the operation of short-term memory, the exclusion of diverting factors, and receptive grammatical competence). The results show that the degree of inferential complexity has a significant effect on children’s comprehension of speech acts: they are more successful in interpreting conventional requests than non-conventional hints. Moreover, even though the grammatical complexity of the sentence carrying the conventional request or the indirect hint does not directly affect the comprehension of the speech act, a strong positive correlation has been found between the success rate of the speech act task and that of the test probing into the comprehension of linguistic constructions. In conclusion we can state that while well-developed receptive grammatical competence facilitates the processing of speech acts in general, the exact deciphering of the illocutionary force of a speech act occurring in an everyday situation represents an inferential task that requires the possession of non-language-specific cognitive skills, too.
speech act, inferentiality, nursery school children, pragmatic competence
The paper deals with metacommunicative signals as recorded in minutes of witness hearing in 16– 18th century witch trials. Via an analysis of instances of metacommunication, the author points out the importance of the contextualised character of language use. A complex approach to context is offered and a dynamic analysis thereof is provided, as is made possible by the texts under scrutiny on the one hand, and is indeed required for an adequate interpretation of those texts on the other. The study foregrounds the historical perspective, and refers to methodological critiques of a direct back-projection of the synchronic perspective and the limitations of abstract synchronic pragmatic descriptions, recommending a dynamic and text-centred analysis of discourse patterns instead.
metacommunicative approach, historical pragmatics, records of witch trials, Middle Hungarian Period, methodology
Szó- és szólásmagyarázatok
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