Emlékkonferencia Elekfi László tiszteletére
Vowel hiatus is resolved through various mechanisms across languages. This paper focuses on hiatus resolution types and their temporal patterns in spontaneous speech. Spontaneous speech samples of 24 young female speakers were selected from the BEA database. Vowel clusters occurring both within and across words were analysed (795 items). The duration of the vowels of the clusters as well as the hiatus fillers were measured from the first glottal pulse to the last glottal pulse of the vowel. Four hiatus resolution types were defined: (i) insertion of a [j]-like filler between the vowels, (ii) transition phase within the vowel cluster, (iii) vowel deletion, and (iv) vowel fusion. Temporal data showed a tendency of coarticulation economy ranging from insertion to deletion of segments.
vowel hiatus, resolution types, occurrence, durations
The paper argues that the author’s multidimensional analysis of Hungarian clauses has its precedents in the works of Hungarian linguists of the past, namely those of Sámuel Brassai, Lénárd Kocsis and László Elekfi. It is demonstrated that Brassai was a dependency grammarian who classified dependents along multiple dimensions. Kocsis made Brassai’s somewhat implicit assumptions about the multidimensional nature of the clause more explicit. Elekfi, building on the Prague School as well as on Brassai, developed a multidimensional description by combining the traditional (largely dependency-based) analysis of sentences with the study of functional sentence perspective. Finally, the author’s proposed approach recognizes three dimensions, with separate representations accounting for frame semantic meaning, speech function and contextualization.
clause structure, Sámuel Brassai, László Elekfi, dependency grammar, multidimensional network.
Relying on the empirical observations of László Elekfi, this paper aims to derive the distribution of the diverse types of pronouns used for anaphoric reference from the features of the pronouns. Personal pronouns are claimed to have the feature values [+strong, +person, +specific]. Demonstratives have these features valued as [+strong, +/–person, +/–specific], and they also have the features [+deictic, +distal/contrastive]. pro is [–strong, +/–person, +specific]. [pro + P] can act either as a personal pronoun, sharing the features [+strong, +person, +specific], or as a pro, having the features [–strong, +/–person, +specific]. The preverbal operator positions of the Hungarian sentence only accept strong pronouns. The distribution of personal pronouns and demonstratives in these positions depends on whether the referent is human, and whether there is a contrast involved. As a result of the economy principle ‘Minimize α’, we find weak pronouns postverbally. The paradigm of weak pronouns is deficient; the plural accusative is represented by a suppletive form (a personal pronoun for most speakers, and a demonstrative for some).
anaphoric reference, personal pronoun, pro, demonstrative pronoun, strong, weak pronoun.
László Elekfi is generally held to have been an outstanding researcher in the fields of phonetics, (poetic) prosody, syntax, lexicography, as well as Hungarian, German, and general linguistics. The author points out that, in addition, he also made valuable contributions to stylistics and language cultivation. His monograph on the syntax of Sándor Petőfi’s poetry and functional sentence perspective is a work on stylistics, too. The author furthermore reminds the reader that Elekfi was not merely a researcher but also an active practitioner of the translation of poetry: he translated a volume-sized set of Stefan George’s poems. He was also a senior contributor to “A Handbook of Language Cultivation”: he wrote nearly 400 pages of entries of that encyclopaedia on phonetics, prosody, syntax, etc. He discussed issues of correctness in language in a number of thoroughly argued papers, and he also published 100 or so minor popularizing contributions, mainly on orthography. Concerning language cultivation, his opinion was that it is not superfluous but it has to be practised with more deliberation than heretofore, and with sufficient exploration of linguistic data and their interconnections.
functional sentence perspective, officialese, foreignisms, translation of poetry, language cultivation, stylistics, stylistic analysis, characterization of style, syntax of poetry
Elekfi’s dictionary of inflectional paradigms was published in 1994 and is a unique accomplishment in Hungarian lexicography as it contains comprehensive inflectional information with respect to the Hungarian word stock on a formal basis, in the form of elaborate inflectional paradigms. At the beginning of the project leading to the Comprehensive Dictionary of Hungarian, Elekfi’s dictionary was taken to be the basis of the assignment of words to inflectional paradigms, and the actual paradigm tables and codes were used directly and included in the first volume of the Dictionary that we called the apparatus volume. The paper discusses the aims, structure, and data management of the inflectional dictionary and confronts all that with its applicability in the Comprehensive Dictionary. It also discusses ways of coming to grips with the double tension between the two dictionaries (descriptive vs. historical character, and intuitive data management vs. the use of corpus data), including the modifications that had to be made in the paradigm tables of the dictionary. The results are illustrated by a large set of examples.
dictionary of inflectional paradigms, comprehensive dictionary, paradigms, encoding, descriptive and historical aspects, intuitions vs. corpus data
In 1966, László Elekfi published a study entitled “The representation of verbs in dictionaries”. There he stated that – as opposed to the noun which is the most important part of speech that carries conceptual content – the verb is more complex, thus its lexicographic representation has a dual role: on the one hand, to classify it in a broader conceptual category, and on the other hand, to represent its grammatical role, particularly its argument structure. This study reviews the most important aspects of László Elekfi’s views on representing verbs in dictionaries and describes his categories of verbs created by analysing the conceptual contents and the syntactic relationships of hundreds of verbs, on the basis of the Hungarian Explanatory Dictionary (ÉrtSz.). It explains how the Comprehensive Dictionary of Hungarian (Nszt.) regulates the lexicographic processing of verbs, and gives an overview of the theoretical principles of those regulations. The study also demonstrates the types of verbs and verbal derivatives that appear in the Nszt. and the methods of representing verb form variants, it shows the difference between the lexicographic representation of subjects, objects, and adverbial arguments, the way the meaning structure of an entry is determined by the argument structure of its headword, and also how the dictionary represents verbal constructions with complements that are not only formally but also lexically restricted.
word form variant, subject, phraseme, adverb, verb, verbal construction, meaning structure, lexicographic representation, dictionary entry, argument, argument structure
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
The oeuvre and role of Kálmán Thaly (1838–1909), historian, politician, philologist, and poet, largely fell into oblivion; his name, with pejorative overtones, is mainly remembered due to his “forged kuruc songs” or the “kuruc song suit” (the kuruc were 16/17th-century Hungarian rebels). Thaly collected and apparently greatly re-stylised some genuine kuruc poems, wrote kuruc poems of his own, and we know of twelve or thirteen poems that he may have written himself but that he attributed to kuruc folk poetry. However, we cannot call him a forger since (a) in the period, “originality” did not exactly mean what it means today; (b) today, “originality” again means something else than it did formerly; and (c) Thaly “played a game”, as he gave away the origin of those poems before he died, just that nobody cared at the time. Historians and literary historians found some apt adjectives for Thaly’s poems: masked, re-attributed, archaistic (Riedl 1913), self-disguising (Borbély 1927). His procedure was called inverted plagiarism (Riedl 1913), counter-plagiarism (Maitre 1913), or reverse appropriation (Szentpéteri 2001). Ágnes R. Várkonyi (1961) writes that he never stole texts but created texts that he then attributed to someone else. Bori (2003) uses the term “successful mimicry”, while Csehy (2005) talks about costumed/masked identity, and even “stolen face”. This paper (on the basis of the relevant literature) demonstrates the genuine features of the kuruc poem entitled Esztergom megvétele (The seizure of Esztergom) pointing towards Thaly’s authorship. The author of the paper adduces arguments in terms of 15 criteria of textual criticism, including 7 strong, 4 medium strong, and 4 weak arguments. Finally, a punchline is added: Thaly’s poems about kuruc soldiers in exile may even reveal an author hidden in his songs or camouflaging his identity, and thus the oeuvre may have a peculiar “queer” reading, as well.
Kálmán Thaly, forged kuruc songs, originality, textual philology, text criticism, forensic linguistics, rhetoric for hiding, queer reading
By combining the perspectives of functional cognitive semantics and pragmatics, the study examines the construal of SAYING in relation to the linguistic activity of reporting. In particular, it deals with cases in which speakers’ reflection on their own speech activity can be interpreted as self-citation or, due to the use of the possible realizations of ‘ego’, as ‘citation from ego’. The study focuses on analysing constructs formed by MONDOM ‘I say’ when they are considered as citations from ego, as well as on how the linguistic activity of reporting changes in the course of reports made in the first person singular.
construal, citation, self-citation, cognitive linguistics, pragmatic approach
Szemle