The present article is a narrower cross-section of the very rich contribution to Croatistics by the Hungarian linguist László Hadrovics (1910-1996): it presents the findings of his research work entailing the relationships between the Hungarian and the Croatian languages, the Croatian literary language in Burgenland (formerly Western Hungary), as well as his findings in etymological studies. Hadrovics was a prominent, internationally acknowledged linguist of his time. His great achievements are marked by richness in data and by numerous novel methodological approaches applied in his monograph on the words of Hungarian origin in the Serbo-Croatian language. His book served as a model for a great number of successive publications. His monograph on the Croatian literary language in Burgenland publishes the first dictionary of this kind, among other things. As far as his etymological studies are concerned, the renewal of his research methods is of prominent interest. Hadrovics broke with the practice of earlier etymological research which was based on using dictionary entries. He went back to the sources themselves, a method that yielded far more reliable results. With his new approach, he achieved outstanding results even by international standards
Keywords: László Hadrovics, relationships between Hungarian and Croatian, the Croatian literary language in Burgenland, etymology, the history of Croatian and Hungarian
Nép és nyelv
The attitudes of speakers of German with respect to dialectally coloured linguistic forms have been changing in a favourable direction in the past few decades. The advance of dialectally coloured linguistic forms in radio and television programs is fostered and complemented by their spreading in novel forms of communication (like e-mail, SMS, chat rooms). The paper explores the major factors that determine the function, extent, and form in which dialectally coloured texts occur in the electronic media. Such fundamental issues are important both for dialectology and linguistics in general and for creative staffs, editors, or actors etc. as they make a deliberate use of dialectal texts possible. The claims of the paper may also prove to be research results that are important for Hungarian dialectology, obviously keeping in mind the more restricted use of dialect in the Hungarian media.
Keywords: German dialects, mass media, language of internet, language of media, use of media, dialectology
Nyelv és stílus
As a consequence of the so-called “double-edged attitude towards language” (Deignan 2008, 151) in cognitive linguistic metaphor research, we do not know too much about the linguistic structure of metaphorical meaning so far. The study tries to answer the following questions: (1) What is the appropriate grammatical device for identifying metaphorical expressions in a corpus? (2) How can we model the meaning of a linguistic metaphor with the help of this device? It examines various theoretical and descriptive proposals: the principle of domain mapping initiated by the autonomous component (Croft), the method of propositionalization (Steen), and constructional analysis (Sullivan). Instead of autonomy/dependence alignment I propose to use the factor of profile determinance from Cognitive Grammar: the profile determinant of a composition tends to symbolize the source domain of a metaphor (the only exception being the predicating modifier construction), hence it makes the metaphorical mapping identifiable. On the other hand the constructional schema has selectional restrictions regarding the profile of the composite structure, thus metaphorical schema-reconfiguration can be modelled as developing profile correspondence in the process of profile determination. In the second part of the study I demonstrate the descriptive effectiveness of my proposal with a pilot study in which the metaphorical use of the Hungarian verb megtámad ‘attack’ is investigated in the Hungarian National Corpus.
Keywords: linguistic metaphor, cognitive grammar, profile determinace, corpus-based research, collocation
The prologue of Milán Füst’s tragedy of fate „Elders at the Wedding” was converted by the poet into an independent poem called Részlet az „Aggok a lakodalmon” című verses színdarabból – Kajetán beszéde a királyhoz (Excerpt from the play „Elders at the Wedding” – Cajetan’s speech to the King). This version of the poem is attached to the whole oeuvre by its methods of text construction and style. That attachment can be seen, among other things, in the various linguistic guises of the notion of „old person” or „old age” (aggastyán, agg, öreg, vénség; aggság, öregség, vénség), as well as in the fact that concordances with these notions carry value judgements, just like the notion of „youth” and its concordances. The content analysis of such concordances and their information value system reveals that – as opposed to the general belief among literary scholars – Füst considered youth, rather than old age, to be the most important period of human life.
Keywords: Milán Füst, youth as a motif, information value, Markov chain, old age as a motif
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
The paper compiles a possibly full list of Hungarian verbs of emotion, defines their semantic classes, and gives an overview of the literature on the problem area of these verbs. On the basis of a corpus of appropriate size, the aspectual properties of these verbs is determined, with a summary of theoretical issues related to lexical aspect, focusing on possibilities of the interpretation of telicity. The author’s analysis relies on Howard Garey’s original concept of telicity. Verbs of emotion are predominantly those of states or of achievements; but some of them are in the classes of activities or accomplishments. The paper looks for, and finds, interconnections across the verbs’ formal features, their occurrence with or without preverbs, their argument structures, and their aspectual classes.
Keywords: lexical aspect, telicity, states, achievements, activities, accomplishments
The paper investigates the construal of epistemological status of characters in narrative texts about history. Epistemological status is a property of characters which is determined by the degree of mental access of a character to the real world of the narrative. The first half of the paper describes the three types of knowledge of the characters by means of Fauconnier’s mental world theory: knowing, believing and not knowing. The second half of the paper presents a quantitative investigation of the epistemological status of 17 historical figures and 12 nations in the American texts of Google Books written between 2000 and 2010. The investigation focuses on the frequency of the following collocations expressing knowing, believing and not knowing: name of the person/nation + knew; name of the person/nation + thought, name of the person/nation + did not know; name of the person/nation + knew nothing. The proportions of the occurrences of the collocations in the cases of historical figures and nations did not show remarkable differences, which means that the construal of the epistemological status of historical figures and nations follows the same general schema. I also examined and compared the frequency of the conceptualization of knowledge in the case of historical figures and nations. The results show that the frequency of the conceptualization of knowledge in the case of nations is not less than in the case of historical figures.
Keywords: historiography, narratology, construal, epistemological status, mental space theory, cognitive factive predicates, corpus
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