A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
Hungarian 1sg -m and 1pl -unk/-ünk clearly show that these endings go back to personal pronouns, at least for speakers who are at least mildly familiar with the history of Hungarian. What has been a puzzle within Hungarian historical linguistics, however, are the origins of 1sg -k and 1pl -(j)uk/-(j)ük. The author reviews some attempts at solving these puzzles in the course of previous research, pointing out their weaknesses and fallacies; the morals he draws from them and his knowledge of Uralic languages make it possible for him to formulate and argue for the results detailed in the paragraphs to follow. The Hungarian conjugational categories are interrelated in a rather complex manner: (1) definite conjugation ↔ indefinite conjugation; (2) within indefinite conjugation: subjective conjugation ↔ medial (or -ik) conjugation The use of the personal endings studied in this paper are distributed across these conjugational paradigms, hence in clarifying their history, one has to pay attention to these categories as well. Clarifying the background of 1sg -k is the toughest nut to crack of all personal endings of Hungarian, yet it finally gave in; the key was that 3sg -ik of the medial conjugation is a complex of the former participial suffix -i and the enhancer -k, together becoming the functional vehicle of mediality. With the full development of the medial conjugation, the emergence of the most frequently used personal endings, that is, the 2sg and especially 1sg verb forms, was inevitable. What turned into the ending of 2sg was -l, one of the threefold descendants of the 2sg personal pronoun (PU/PFU *-t- > > H -d, -l, -sz); whereas 1sg acquired its -k, coming from the former enhancer, by association with -ik, the exponent of mediality in 3sg. The detection of the pronominal origin of both 1sg -k and 1pl -(j)uk/-(j)ük became possible by ferreting out, in view of data from related languages, a number of facts and events of historical phonology, historical morphology, and morphosyntax.
Ugric languages, personal pronoun, person-number ending, agglutination, historical phonology
The present study intended to analyze word durations both in sentence repetitions and in spontaneous speech samples produced by 5-year-old and 7-year-old Hungarian-speaking children. The durations of the older children’s words were significantly longer than those of the younger children in repetitions but not in spontaneous speech. The number of the syllables was a particularly decisive factor in durations. The reduction tendency of the longer words was characteritic of all children’s pronunciation, and it was specifically marked with the 7-year-old children in repeated words. Function words were produced shorter than content words by all children in both speech styles. Temporal patterns of words are good indicators for developing articulation, lexical access, and speech motor control.
words of various lengths, speech styles, durations, word types, 5- and 7-year-olds
Whether or not Hungarian has a subjunctive mood is debated since its form is the same as that of the imperative. In a traditional morphology-based approach, it cannot be taken to be a separate mood despite the fact that there are important differences between sentences conveying invitation to perform an action and subordinate clauses reporting on such invitations or not containing such things at all but involving verb forms with the imperative marker -j. The author of this paper does not insist on a classical morphology-based approach to the category of mood, and accordingly she defines the subjunctive, not represented separately in the verbal paradigm, as part of a syntactic category, making a distinction between verbal mood (a morphological category) and sentence modality (a [morpho]syntactic category). The paper introduces the various functions of verb forms exhibiting the mood marker -j and various formal properties related to them, thus making a contribution to a more exact understanding of the imperative and the subjunctive, and to the clarification of their similarities and differences in Hungarian. In this description involving both theoretical and practical considerations, the author relies on results of previous studies in the literature and her experiences as a teacher of Hungarian as a foreign language in trying to clarify a number of issues pertaining to the use of imperatives and subjunctives.
imperative, direct order/request, reported speech, subjunctive, mood vs modality, factuality, veridicality, main-clause frame expression vs main-clause keyword
This paper examines the speech act of request in the letters of Krisztina Barkóczy, a Hungarian noble woman, that she wrote to her husband, Sándor Károlyi at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. The research takes a closer look on the subjects of requests, their linguistic presentations and the strategies used in connections with them from the viewpoint of historical sociopragmatics and it explores the connections between them. The base for this research is the classification established by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper involving nine categories that describe the representation of intention in connection with requests from the most direct to the most indirect. After discussing the theoretical background and the results of previous researches necessary for analysing the act of request, the examined letters will be presented, then with the help of diagrams, the paper explains the significant differences compared to the modern modes of request and in which way the result show similarities with the research of requests from the 16th and 17th century. Finally, the paper points out to further ways of approach in examining Middle Hungarian request by bringing in the concept (and theory) of relational work.
speech act of request, historical sociopragmatics, Middle Hungarian, letters
The present study is an investigation on the evolution of resultative constructions in Hungarian. The preterite (verb + -t) has evolved from a resultative construction with a past participle (-t/-tt) and has undergone the aoristic drift: it has evolved into a universal past tense (biztosít-ott-uk ‘we secured it’). During this process, it has also lost its periphrastic character. After that, the auxiliary lenni + -va/-ve construction has taken over its place as a resultative (biztosítva van ‘it is secured/it has been secured’). This form also shows some traces of grammaticalization into a preterite. Finally, the auxiliary lenni + -t/-tt construction (biztosított volt ‘it was secured’) seems to be evolving again into a resultative, and thus undergoing the same process that the preterite underwent more than a millennium ago. This fact gives the spine of spiral theory. The main claim of the paper is that these constructions are all equivalently natural constituents of the language, having reached diff erent stages of grammaticalisation. The paper also gives an overview of the european context in order to argue for the naturalness of the presence and the construction of these forms.
periphrastic constructions, grammaticalization, linguistic change, resultatives
Nyelv és stílus
In the possible world of Karinthy’s sketch A szürkék hegedőse ‘A Fiddler for the Drab Ones’, parliamentary diaries constitute a source of humour. Humour as an aesthetic quality, possibly accompanying intelligence, is an ability to mentally process verbal and transferred messages involving symbolic and abstract notions. The reader has to have such ability in order to comprehend the allusions in A szürkék hegedőse, apply them to phenomena of the real world and appreciate them appropriately.
allusions, represented objectivity, nonsense text, humour, Frigyes Karinthy
Kisebb közlemények
Szemle