Tanulmány
Abstract: In my treatise, I analysed the attitudes in connection with the Hungarian use of language in Transcarpathia with matched guise technique. During the survey, I compared the language attitudes of Transcarpathian-Hungarian students, who study in tertiary education in Hungary or in Transcarpathia. In my research, the participants were asked to listen to two recordings. One of the recordings contained words borrowed from Russian and Ukrainian languages, which is typical in the Transcarpathian-Hungarian use of language. In the other text, these borrowed words were replaced with their Hungarian equivalents. My research was based on the hypothesis that the students will prefer the language use of the agent in the Hungarian version. Moreover, I assumed that the college students of Transcarpathia will evaluate the agent speaking in the Transcarpathian version more positively than the Transcarpathian-Hungarian students, who study in Hungary. According to the results, both group of participants preferred the agent speaking in the Hungarian version.
Keywords: bilingualism, linguistic attitude, borrowing of words, matched guise technique
Abstract: Since December 2019 Covid-19 has spread throughout the world at a dangerously fast pace and soon become a global pandemic. The virus, which is often talked about metaphorically, is the most frequently discussed subject nowadays. Many linguists have investigated the metaphorical conceptualizations of the virus; nevertheless, no research is available on the conceptualization of Covid-19 among doctors. Hence, the present paper investigates the metaphorical conceptualization of Covid-19 among medical professionals. Furthermore, the paper compares the doctors' conceptualizations of the virus to those of laypeople (office workers) and offers a detailed elaboration on the differences in metaphor usage in two sample groups.
Keywords: Covid-19, conceptual metaphor, contextual influence, medical linguistics
Abstract: This paper presents a small-scale study of figurative language production in essays written by Georgian learners of English. The method of metaphor identification implemented in the study is a slightly modified version of MIPVU (Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit), Instead of MIPVU’s approach to the identification of lexical units and metaphors, which distinguishes phrasal verbs and idioms, our approach differs depending on the decomposability of multiword units, whether phrasal verbs or idioms. The study explores the major challenges that may arise in trying to assign figurative meanings to the constituents of multiword units, and it also illustrates the major steps of MIPVU: 1) identification of lexical units in the text, 2) determining the contextual sense, 3) selecting the basic sense based on a dictionary, 4) deciding whether the relationship between the basic and contextual sense is metaphorical or not. This study is part of a project to identify different kinds of errors made during figurative language production, with a special emphasis on the errors influenced by L1.
Keywords: figurative language, metaphor production, idioms, L2
Abstract: The paper investigates Hungarian voice actors’ attitudes on the language quality of texts they have to read out for dubbing and narrating foreign language audiovisual products as part of an overall study that is supported by the most popular voice actors of present-day Hungary and the trade union of Hungarian voice actors theoretically and practically. Since most of the foreign language audiovisual products that are released in Hungarian television, cinemas, film theaters and even for the Hungarian consumers of online streaming channels still get Hungarian dubbing or narration, and for most people it is the only accessible way of watching these products, the language quality of it is worth studying, regardless of the dichotomy of attitudes on watching audiovisual products in Hungarian or original (or other) language. The results and the dissemination of them can help develop the quality assurance system of Hungarian dubbing that serves the interest of many millions of consumers in the end.
Keywords: audiovisual products, Hungarian dubbing, language attitudes, sociolinguistics, voice actors
Abstract: This paper aims to present the impression management (IM) tactics of Hungarian university students. Firstly, it gives a short overview about the theoretical approaches about IM regarding to social psychology and pragmatics. The main aim is to define IM in Hungarian daily language use and identify the IM methods. The paper is based on the results of an open-ended discourse completion test. The results require an extended taxonomy of IM tactics, also manifest that there are certain procedures influencing the speaker’s face (cf. Goffman 1955; Brown & Levinson 1987). Consequently, the paper gives a refined definition of IM based on the corpus, and introduces IM tactics previously undetermined.
Keywords: impression management, strategies, tactics, discourse completion test
Abstract: The aim of our research is to focus on the problems of textual cohesion and coherence among university students. We have clearly detailed the relation between the coherence meta-rules and the construction of the general meaning of a text, from the written productions collected and interpreted as a support requiring all the interest of linguistic studies. We have succeeded in detecting some difficulties faced during the transmission of information, and the relationship between ideas which touches on the enunciative level of the text.
Keywords: cohesion, coherence, text, grammar, textuality
Abstract: Involvement refers to the engagement of the speaker or hearer in discourse. As the most typical feature of spoken language, it has been regarded as one of the major features of L2 writing due to writers’ lack of register awareness. However, a closer look at a number of related studies reveals that the investigated language data are not well selected and that Asian learners of English are less targeted, which might make their research findings less convincing. By employing the ‘Involved versus informational production’ dimension from Biber’s 1988 multidimensional analysis (MDA) model, this study sets out to verify the previous findings regarding involvement based on a well-balanced Asian learner English corpus - International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). The results reveal that learner English writings are not necessarily more involved than the English writings by native English speakers as English learners from Asian ESL contexts including Hong Kong, Philippines, Pakistan, and Singapore, show an informational tendency; learners' L1 affects their usage of some specific involvement features but it, in general, does not affect the overall involvement in their writings; learners’ proficiency and involvement are in a negative correlation; female Asian learners generally tend to be less involved than their male peers in writing, which is contrary to the case of native English speaker group; gender differences regarding involvement are more significant in L1 writing than in L2 writing;
Keywords: Involvement, Learner English Writing, Asian learners of English, Multidimensional analysis
Abstract: The present paper explores the pragmatic characteristics of the interrogational and response patterns in witness depositions of Hungarian witch trials. The source of the text driven analysis are four unpublished records of depositions from the 18th century, however, the preliminary exploration builds on more than a hundred records available from the „Old and Middle Hungarian Corpus of informal language use”. The analysis of the texts highlights that the interrogation patterns shall be described according to content rather than to formal features, since many of the yes-no questions proved to be not confirmation seeking (as the literature suggests) but information seeking. The authority used both information seeking questions involving the common believes concerning witchcraft (resulting in freely presented narratives from the witnesses) and some more specified and seemingly suggestive ones building on the experiences and suspicions of the community. Taking the close reading of the depositions into account, the latter ones also did not influenced the response patterns substantially, since the explored records contain various assumptions and attitudes of the witnesses accepted by the authority.
Keywords: Hungarian witch trials, 17-18th centuries, witness depositions, patterns of interrogation and response, historical pragmatics, evidentiality
Abstract: In a larger project, we study the perceptual representation of the vowel system of (American) English of monolingual learners with Persian and bilingual learners with Persian and Azerbaijani as their mother tongue(s) to predict and explain problems in acquiring the pronunciation of English. In the present paper, we explore the learner’s mapping of the 11 English vowels onto the 6 Persian or 9 Azerbaijani vowels within the framework of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM). Twenty-two monolingual and 27 bilingual Iranian adolescent learners of English participated in this experiment. Results show that the bilinguals show different assimilation patterns than the bilinguals, even when the latter respond in Persian mode. The three extra (central) vowels in Azerbaijani may offer an advantage over the Persian system for Iranian learners of English. Neither the monolingual nor the bilingual Iranian EFL learners are sensitive to the vowel quality contrast /i~ɪ/ and /u~ʊ/ but in different ways - suggesting different learning problems.
Keywords: American English, Azerbaijani, Persian, L2 sound acquisition, Perceptual Assimilation Model, PAM test, fit index
Abstract: Being present on social media platforms has become an advantage for politicians as they aspire to be relatable and likable in the eyes of the voters. Their active participation leads to the odd phenomenon of receiving compliments, while also receiving a large amount of insults in the form of comments. In general, women are the main receivers of online compliments and these compliments mostly focus on appearance (Maíz-Arévalo & García-Gómez 2013). However, in the case of female politicians a compliment on their appearance is not necessarily a propitious speech act and can have an inverse effect, such as destructing cognitive performance in the long run (Kahalon, Shnabel & Becker 2018). The aim of the study is to investigate the Facebook comment section of six Hungarian female politicians from different parties, analyse, and determine the distribution of compliments and insults that they receive. Results show that the number and types of compliments and insults each politician receives can differ, as they are mostly personalized, but identifiable trends were observed. Factors such as the degree of activity, extent of media coverage, position and participation in international politics and party affiliation could play a role in the number of insults a female politician receives online. In total, the examined female politicians received more insults than compliments.
Keywords: compliment, insult, online communication, female politicians
Abstract: The present study aims to provide an overview of recent work on children’s comprehension of verbal irony. First, the concept itself, then comprehension of irony are discussed, with special reference to the factors vs processes that can contribute to successful irony comprehension. Particular emphasis is placed on children’s interpretation and production of irony by a presentation of several cross-linguistic studies conducted recently. Finally, open questions left unexplored are briefly examined.
Keywords: verbal irony, children, irony comprehension, cross-linguistic studies
Abstract: This paper addresses the ability of collective nouns to license plural subject-verb agreement in Tunisian Arabic. One of the defining characteristics of collective nouns is that even when they are morphologically singular, they can trigger both singular and plural agreement with the verb in some languages, including English, as well as varieties of languages, such as Tunisian Arabic. This paper is based on a preliminary corpus study in which I concluded that collective nouns in Tunisian Arabic can be categorized into two main groups: nouns that only trigger singular agreement and nouns that allow both singular and plural agreement. I applied these results to design a language questionnaire for Tunisian Arabic native speakers to investigate their acceptability of the use of plural agreement with Tunisian Arabic collective nouns. The results of the study show that participants accepted the use of plural concord with all of the nouns belonging to the two groups. I conclude that the nouns used in this questionnaire can trigger plural concord regardless of the initial categorization that I established.
Keywords: collective nouns, subject-verb agreement, Tunisian Arabic
Abstract: The paper presents the findings of an empirical study on the use of the Hungarian kellesz ‘must.FUT’. This dialectal structure has not been extensively studied in the literature. The authors who have worked on it almost always consider the effect of temporal factors only on its usage/acceptability. In this work, I argue that kellesz is not only preferred (to kell) when its perspective time is future, but there are other factors that can greatly affect its acceptability. In order to identify such factors, I examine examples collected mainly from the internet. I base my hypotheses on these findings. To prove them, I carry out a study. It consists of a production study and an interview. I conclude that the choice of the speakers (between kell and kellesz) is affected by the following factors: the evidence type (defined in the context), the certainty of the speaker, the intended/perceived politeness of the utterance, and the speaker’s commitment. I argue that there are two ‘main’ meaning aspects of kellesz. The use of kellesz can emphasize that the proposition is not necessary at present, but it is probable that it will be necessary in the future, or it can emphasize that the speaker is unsure of the necessity of the proposition at present because it has been inferred (uncertainty), or the speaker has second thoughts about it (delaying effect).
Keywords: future-time reference, modality, politeness
Abstract: The study aims to present a possible way of applying the interdisciplinary text approach in literary translation criticism through the comparison of two French literary texts and their Hungarian translation. Instead of traditional literary criticism, often based on subjective impressions, the study presents a complex comparative text analysis approach, in which text linguistics, especially semiotic textology and functional stylistics complement each other and together ensure the objective character of the equivalence analysis of the source and target language texts. The comparative text analysis aims to demonstrate as a practical example that text linguistics can provide theoretical and methodological viewpoints that contribute to the practice of literary translation criticism according to scientific criteria.
Keywords: literary translation criticism, translation equivalence, text linguistics, semiotic textology, stylistics
Abstract: Such a universal, yet abstract concept as time shows variation in metaphorical language. This research focuses on metaphors within the framework of the cognitive metaphor theory, investigating time through a contrastive, cross-linguistic approach in three satellite framed languages. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this study attempts to identify how time passes in language in a metaphorical context, through an empirical corpus-based study. The aim is to investigate how the spatialization and the transience of time surfaces in time metaphors through verbs in a sample of three languages, with a focus on the following aspects: motion through space as well as transience (Galton 2011: 701). Differences such as preference of spatialization or of transience without the spatial aspect are expected to be found.
Keywords: cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, conceptual metaphor theory, transience, spatialization, motion
Abstract: Metaphorical anaphors are identified by Skirl (2007) as a special case of textual anaphors which have not yet been investigated thoroughly either by linguistic theories of metaphor or by theories of anaphors with a text linguistic basis. Taking Skirl’s observations as a starting point and applying them to German, we use the text-world model of Monika Schwarz (2008) to argue that metaphorical anaphors can be considered as a type of progressive anaphor, which - similar to other types of progressive anaphors - enrich the text-world model with a rhematic (comment) element, thus serving continuity and progression within a text simultaneously.
Keywords: anaphor, metaphor, textlinguistics, emergent meaning, textual progression
Abstract: The objective of the present inquiry is to investigate the language contact situation resulting from the bilingualism of Hungarians living in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The present study conducted in the United Kingdom and Ireland, involving 200 participants divided into two groups as experimental groups, based on the amount of time they spent in the target countries, explores the use of three linguistic variables: the ‘must+Verbimperative’, the allative case, and the adessive and ablative case suffixes related to comparative structures, in the language use of the Hungarian immigrant communities, focusing on the results of grammaticality judgment tasks in comparison to outcomes of groups serving as control groups in earlier studies conducted in Hungary and the Carpathian Basin. A modified and digitized version of the questionnaire of the Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary research project (SHOH) was administered. Even though it has been proven earlier that language contact promotes nonstandard language use, this study does not unquestionably support this view and does not indicate any substantial changes in the language use of the immigrant communities in comparison to the control groups.
Keywords: bilingualism, language contact, language use, linguistic variables, migration
Abstract: The paper takes as a starting point Hamblin and Gibbs ‘s (1999) claim that kick alone already had the sense ‘die’ before it was used in the idiom kick the bucket, and this may be the case with verbs in other nondecomposable expressions. The idioms provided by Hamblin and Gibbs (1999) are examined for attestations in OED and the dates are compared with the dates of matching meanings of the verbs to see whether the verb with the same sense emerged before the idiom. The verb is considered to have a matching sense if it is the same as the holistic sense of the expression (where this sense cannot be distributed over the components) or the sense of the verbal part of the idiom (where the idiom is decomposable). It has been found that the verbs of some idioms (typically decomposable expressions) emerged in a matching sense before the idiom appeared. Kick the bucket is exceptional, since the verbs of nondecomposable idioms do not have senses closely related to the idiomatic meaning.
Keywords: idioms, metaphors, nondecomposable, meaning development, historical semantics
Abstract: This paper aims to examine morphological derivation from verb to noun of domestic animal sounds in the Neolatin languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Romanian). According to the present comparative analysis, verb to noun derivations had 4 major types such as back-formation (32%), application of suffixes (50%) and of participium (12%), and other minor categories. However, if they are monitored closely, this distribution may vary in the individual languages, e.g.: French applies suffixes in 83% and so does Catalan with back-formation in 63%. Also, the use of infinitive as noun with article offers an alternative.
Keywords: morphological derivation, verb to noun, Neolatin languages, back-formation, suffix, participium, infinitive, onomatopoeic word, infinitive
Abstract: In this paper I offer an overview of the fundamental structural and functional properties of the Hungarian noun phrase in a descriptive approach developed in Alberti & Farkas (2018a,b) and Farkas & Alberti (2018a,b), and I present how their generalisations intended to be theory-neutral in the generative linguistic paradigm can be handled in the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar, with glimpses at alternative generative analyses at appropriate points.
Keywords: syntax, Hungarian, noun phrase, Lexical-Functional Grammar, constituent structure, functional structure, grammatical functions
Abstract: The current paper discusses a pilot study with a focus on L2 learners’ multimodal reading habits. More specifically, the study seeks to investigate (1) how second language learners read multimodal texts of different image-text relations, (2) which image-text relation builds a stronger visual or verbal mental representation of the text, and (3) whether age affects multimodal reading processes. In the present study, we focus our attention on students’ reading practices of two types of multimodal texts which demonstrate the image-more-general-than-text and text-more-general-than-image relations (Martinec & Salway 2005) of visual and verbal representations of meaning. To do so, 70 B1 level Hungarian English language learners attend the research to read and respond to an online multimodal reading test. The preliminary results reveal that not all intersemiotic relations lead to a stronger mental model of multimodal texts; also, the generality of the mode and the degree of participant’s visual involvement with the text affect both the processing and speed of reading and information recall. In addition, as far as the participants’ age is concerned, adult second language learners spend longer time on reading multimodal texts and rely on images more frequently to respond to the texts. The present research may develop more comprehensive theoretical accounts of multimodal reading among L2 learners and inform pedagogical practices.
Keywords: multimodality, L2 reading, intersemiotic relations, multimodal literacy
Abstract: All the languages in the learners’ repertoire could influence the learners’ second language (L2) utterances. One of the possible impacts is the transfer in metaphorical conceptualization. Hence, this study investigates the transfer of metaphorical conceptualizations from Indonesian English as Lingua Franca (ELF) learners’ L1 (Bahasa Indonesia) and IL (Makasarese) into English. The investigation of the learners’ conceptual metaphor is focused on the metaphor of life. Therefore, extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and contextual factors in metaphorical conceptualizations are used to analyze the data collected from the writing task of 72 students. As a result, nine conceptualizations based on three contextual factors of life are found. Those conceptualizations are; LIFE IS STRUGGLE, LIFE IS GIFT, LIFE IS JOURNEY, LIFE IS SHARING, LIFE IS TEACHER, LIFE IS TASK, LIFE IS STORY, and LIFE IS BOOK, and the contextual factors are; social situation, cultural situation, and interest and concern.
Keywords: Metaphor, Conceptualization, Context, English as Lingua Franca (ELF)
Abstract: This paper focuses on humor and teasing naturally occurring in the English as a lingua franca (ELF) conversations of English speakers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. Participants were eight dyads (participants in four dyads were socially close to each other, whereas those in four dyads were strangers), and each dyad had English speakers from two different ASEAN countries. The data was from the video recordings of each dyad cooking together and retrospective interviews with each participant while watching the recorded video together with the researcher. Close and in-depth analysis was carried out on instances of humor and teasing by participants in the data collected. The data in the study demonstrated how ASEAN ELF speakers construct humor and teasing in their ELF interactions. Generally, participants in the dyads where humor and teasing occurred were responsive to their interlocutors’ humor or teasing by jointly constructing humor or teasing with their interlocutors or at least by responding with laughter. The findings showed that humorous talks and teasing were frequently occasioned in ELF interactions of ASEAN English speakers who were close to each other, and, further-more, the ELF speakers were collaborative and interactive with their interlocutors in constructing humorous talks and teasing in their ELF interactions.
Keywords: ASEAN, ELF, humor, teasing, laughter
Abstract: The study of linguistic synesthesia, i.e. the seemingly incompatible integration of concepts associated with distinct sensory domains on the level of linguistic expressions, revolves around three major issues: (i) the relationship between synesthesia as a neuro-psychological and a verbal phenomenon; (ii) the directionality of the synesthetic transfer from one sensory domain to another; and (iii) the conceptual motivation of synesthetic expressions. The present paper takes a closer look at this latter issue. After giving a review of existing approaches to the conceptual background of verbal synesthesia, i.e. the metaphor, the metonymy and the literal view, I will point out that all these approaches are based on some cross- or supra-modally common conceptual dimensions in two or more sensory domains. Furthermore, I will argue that synesthetic expressions are more varied regarding their conceptual background than earlier assumed and some of them are not based on cross-modal similarities or correspondences but rather on (a) the (recurrent) co-occurrence of stimuli belonging to different sensory modalities and/or on (b) intra-modal similarities, hence they can be considered genuinely metonymic.
Keywords: synesthesia, metaphor, metonymy, synesthetic expressions, sensory words, sensory linguistics
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