Volume 123, Number 1 |
ISSN 1585-4515 |
January–March 1999 |
ABSTRACTS IN ENGLISH
Deme, László: Mother tongue movements and their moral upshot. Hungarian actress Blanka Péchy had set up a foundation back in 1960 for awarding exemplary elocution and for fostering Hungarian speech culture. That foundation initiated a wide-ranging movement – in fact, a cluster of movements – that unites its members in mother tongue clubs, national competitions, meetings, and summer camps. Participants of the movement form groups around a radio programme that was also founded by her twenty-four years ago.
In three consecutive papers, the author (who used to be a colleague of the founder and is now her successor) summarizes the history of those movements (1998, Number 3), analyses their moral effects as suggested by letters coming regularly from participants (1998, Number 4), and – in the present sequel – deals with some of the social problems that the movements reveal and probably help to solve.
Balázs, Géza: The situation of language culture in Hungary: A review and some suggestions. Following a suggestion made by the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Hungarian Language Committee of that Academy compiled a report on the relationship between linguistics and language strategy in Hungary. The introduction of that report was written by László Deme, and its specific points were drafted by Géza Balázs. The latter include an overview of (1) the situation of Hungarian language strategy and language culture, (2) linguistic research pertaining to the issue of language strategy, (3) the major areas of language cultivation and (4) its specific objectives.
Gósy, Mária: On the difficulties of proofreading. Difficulties of proofreading are rooted in the subprocesses of the reading mechanism. This paper deals with those factors that provide an opportunity for identification or, in the contrary, block the identification of the typing errors when reading a text. Results based on experimental data show that exchange, insert and metathesis of the letters can be relatively easy to detect, however, identification of the orthographic mistakes and the lack of letters is more difficult. The most difficult type of mistakes to be found is the so-called ’content error’ when the typing error results in a meaningful word.
Cs. Nagy, Lajos: The structure of some designations and their word geographical realizations in Medvesalja. The author carried out research among the gradually decreasing Hungarian population of twelve villages in the relatively separated region of Medvesalja, Slovakia. The research was based on lexical and morphological elicitation questions of The Atlas of Hungarian Dialects (A magyar nyelvjárások atlasza). The present study focuses on regional usage in the designation of the plant ‘maize’ and its parts. Sixty-eight designations are used for the fifteen concepts involved, thirty-five of which are unmotivated, while thirty-three are motivated. In the last part of the study, the author presents some geographical aspects of usage that are illustrated by six maps.
†Hadrovics, László: Hungarian–Southern Slav intellectual contacts in the Middle Ages. This paper presents an overview of László Hadrovics’s investigations concerning Hungarian–Southern Slav contacts as summarized mainly for the educated general public. A sixteenth-century Croatian poem, entitled „Cantilena de sabatho”, is published in the author’s own Hungarian translation.
Nyomárkay, István: Lanosović’s “Anleitung” within a European context. The present study and its continuation both analyse the influence of a late eighteenth-century Vienna school grammar on contemporary Croatian and Hungarian grammars concerning morphology and syntax. The paper focuses on the grammar by Marijan Lanosović that was published in 1795 in Buda. For antecedents of this paper, see Magyar Nyelvőr 122 [1998]: 184–9 and 451–8.
Bańczerowski, Janusz: Principles of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics represents the postmodern paradigm in science and proposes a new type of scientific research. The paper presents the main principles and methods of cognitive linguistics applied in the description of language, its grammar and meaning. The author considers the following basic issues: (1) The role of metaphors in linguistic communication; (2) Prototype theory; (3) Problems of reconstruction of a linguistic world view; (4) Some reflexions concerning knowledge representation in artificial intelligence.
Kugler, Nóra: Syntax. The paper is a chapter of „Hungarian Grammar” (Borbála Keszler ed., Magyar grammatika. Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, to be published in 1999), which is not only a university textbook but, according to its authors’ intentions, a reference grammar as well.
Syntax offers a general introduction to syntax studies. The approach applied is rather formal and traditional in its use of basic analytical categories, but it is rather functional in the interpretation of the system. It introduces functional grammatical and pragmatic categories such as aspect, modality, presupposition, speech acts, etc. It aims to answer questions like „What are sentences and utterances?”, „What are the prototypes of Hungarian sentence structure?”. Illustrations and tables are provided for better orientation.
Uzonyi Kiss, Judit–Tuba, Márta: How many auxiliaries are there in Hungarian? In traditional Hungarian descriptions, only the copula van ‘be’ was considered to be an auxiliary. Later the verb fog ‘will’ in the structure fog + infinitive, the verb marad ‘remain’ with the set complement valamilyen állapotban ‘in some state’, and the verb múlik ‘pass’ were also claimed to be auxiliaries.
In the recent literature some authors have described an increasing number of lexical items as auxiliaries. György C. Kálmán et al. tell verbs and auxiliaries apart mainly on the basis of two criteria: word order and stress patterns. The argumentation of Klára Lengyel involves the criteria of defective paradigms, the formation of participles, and the replacement of the infinitive by a nominal complement. In the view of Katalin É. Kiss, all the items in question are verbs governing set complements.
Through the examination of various sentence patterns, the paper aims to prove that verbs considered to be auxiliaries behave in the same way as main verbs do with respect to stress and word order. The paper arrives at the conclusion that one group of the verbs concerned govern an infinitival complement which is either a direct object or a goal adverbial, and another group – the members of which, in every case, can be replaced by a nominal predicate – govern an infinitival subject complement.
Lengyel, Klára: On auxiliary verbs. This paper is a reply to „How many auxiliaries are there in Hungarian?” by Judit Uzonyi Kiss and Márta Tuba (in the present issue of Magyar Nyelvőr). It introduces the chapter on auxiliary verbs of the forthcoming university textbook „Hungarian Grammar” (Borbála Keszler ed., Magyar grammatika. Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, to be published in 1999). The author draws a distinction between function words contributing to sentence constituents and function words contributing to word forms. She calls the former ‘sentence constituent function words’ (or copulas), while the latter are referred to as ‘word form function words’. Then she discusses the syntactic and morphological behaviour of such function words in detail. In the second part of the paper she comments on the analysis and teaching of auxiliaries. She touches upon the auxiliary-like verbs of Hungarian and the problems of distinguishing verbs from auxiliaries.