The time of foundation of the monastery of Veszprém Valley (before 1002) is subject to general consensus among Hungarian historical linguists on the basis of earlier historical research in diplomatics. Thus, the deed of gift of the monastery, written in Greek, is taken to be the earliest extant written record of Hungarian. Recently historians like Gyula Moravcsik and György Györffy have argued that the actual foundation of the monastery may have happened later, around 1018. The latter view can now be found in papers on historical linguistics, too. The latest discussions of this topic were Holler (2011) and (2012). In those papers, the author argued against Moravcsik and Györffy’s view and dated the foundation of the monastery even earlier than usual (around 980). The present paper departs from the traditional view of historians linking the time of foundation to the assumed founder (be it Prince Géza or King Stephen) and historical events related to him, and suggests that pieces of evidence contributed by philology, diplomatics, ecclesiastical law, and monastic history should be taken into consideration instead. The author first wants to clarify the ecclesiastical legal notion of auctor monasterii, a term occurring in the diploma renewing the deed of gift (1109) and having given rise to plenty of guesswork during the related historiographic debate now going back to a whole century. Then, he submits the Greek text of the deed of foundation to philological analysis, trying to identify the actual person referred to by that term. The canonical/ecclesiastic historical circumstances of the foundation of the monastery by the Greek metropolitan now determine the possible date of foundation. On that basis, the traditional date turns out to be confirmed, with a slight modification of a single year: “before 1001”. In sum, the author wishes to reinstall this document in its due position as indeed the earliest written record extant of the Hungarian language.

Keywords: deed of gift of Veszprém Valley, time of foundation of the monastery of Veszprém Valley, Byzantine church in Hungary, deed of gift in Greek, auctor monasterii, the metropolitan of Turcia.

Szentgyörgyi Rudolf

This paper discusses the categorisation of proper names in the framework of prototype theory. After an introduction to the properties of prototypical proper names, the various ways of name giving are surveyed on the basis of that categorisation, and the role of categorisation in the interpretation and use of an item as a proper name is explored. In particular, we discuss the typical and less typical or culture dependent nature of the various categories of proper names, categories in the boundary area of proper names and common nouns, as well as factors determining the categorisation of proper names. Finally, the paper briefly introduces the role of the categorisation of proper names in their turning into common nouns, as well as in works of fiction and of cinematic art.

Keywords: proper name, categorisation, prototype theory, name giving, use of names, proper names used as common nouns.

Slíz Mariann

An ironic utterance is the presentation of difference or deflection. That is, we distinguish two things with the help of irony, via a procedure I call change of category. At the speaker’s level, irony is a change of perspective: the speaker uses an ironic utterance to create a distance from something and to force the listener to doubt his or her own knowledge or opinion (to raise his/her metapragmatic awareness), thus forcing him or her to change perspective in order to accommodate to novel pieces of knowledge. In the case of irony, what has been said and what has been implied will remain in interaction, due to the nature of negation, and the goal of using irony is that contextual information should not disambiguate the pragmatic meaning. In the case of irony, the speaker’s intention is to keep up the ambiguity of the pragmatic meaning, similarly to double negation and ‘neg-raised’ negation.

Keywords: irony, change of perspective, metapragmatic awareness, opposition, negation, difference.

Komlósi Boglárka

Whether or not we are aware of the fact, we continually monitor our own speech while we speak, to see whether what we are saying is appropriate in both content and form. Even though the Hungarian literature offers copious data on self-correction processes operative in various age groups, we know of no research that specifically contrasts the application, degree of success, and temporal properties of self-monitoring processes across three different age groups. In the present paper we study the issue of how self-monitoring operates in 9-year-old schoolchildren, 20 to 32-yearold young people, and 66 to 80-year-old speakers, respectively. We analyse temporal features of repetitions, restarts, and corrections in spontaneous narratives. The results show that the frequency of occurrence of these disfluency phenomena, as well as the types of errors committed and their corrections, do differ across age groups. Statistically significant differences can be demonstrated to exist in the temporal properties of repetitions, while in the relative durations of editing phases of restarts and corrections similar (though not significant) tendencies can be found.

Keywords: self-monitoring, self-correction, editing phase, age and gender differences.

Bóna Judit – Neuberger Tilda

In this paper, the author has collected old and new occurrences of the Hungarian phraseme halál árnyékának völgye ‘valley of the shadow of death’. Even in the earliest Hungarian translations of the Bible, not independently of the identity of the source language, the tradition concerning this phrase bifurcates. Protestant translators may have been familiar with the complex meaning of Hebrew calmávet that has become a point of controversy since. This translation error, however, survives to the present day as a 16th-century tradition.

Keywords: Bible translation, tradition of Protestant Bible translations, halál árnyékának völgye ‘valley of the shadow of death’.

Csernák-Szuhánszky Debóra

This paper compares two versions of a short story written by Dezső Kosztolányi early on in his career from the point of view of style and usage. The earlier version was entitled ‘Ilike at table’ published in 1908 in the writer’s first volume of short stories. Its protagonist is a four-year-old girl participating at her grandmother’s “banquet”. Three years later, the writer revised and extended the short story, and gave it a new title: ‘Tea party’. The author investigates the development of Kosztolányi’s art of writing in terms of the amendments and additions. In a further part of the analysis, the author points out that the principle of text organisation in this short story is the conflict between the diverse viewpoints of the small child and the adults around her. The increasing tension is finally resolved by the little girl’s cathartic fit of weeping. (The motive of crying serves the function of culmination in other short stories by Kosztolányi, too.)

Keywords: motive, emblem, textology, narrator’s viewpoint, principle of text organisation.

Kemény Gábor