Volume 123, Number 2 |
ISSN 1585-4515 |
April–June 1999 |
ABSTRACTS IN ENGLISH
Nyomárkay, István: Forms of courtesy in language use, Part 2. This paper discusses, on the basis of literary texts, the use of the term of address úr ‘mister’ by Hungarian middle class speakers in the first half of the 19th century. The analysis focuses on the use of ‘family name + úr’ and ‘name of profession + úr’ constructions.
Kis, Ádám: The Academic Orthographical Regulations and the Computer. These days, many people condemn the official spelling standards. Critics rather object the implementation because it is difficult to question the need for standards. The criticism consists of ad hoc objections against particular rules in the spelling regulations. These rules either seem quite subjective (i. e. reflecting the linguistic taste of one or another committee member), or do not correspond to what many people sense as correct language use.
Some of today’s technical achievements, namely computer software for natural language processing, might help to make decisions in these questions. Among the software products, those that assist in writing with a computer – especially spelling checkers in word processors –, have special importance. This paper examines the relationship between the Hungarian Spelling Regulations [of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences] (Akadémiai Helyesírási Szabályzat) and a Hungarian spell checking system.
Fehér, Erzsébet: The archeology of theoretical stylistics. The paper reviews Ancient theories of style from Gorgias to Augustine by Tamás Adamik. First, it discusses whether the main topic of the book, the study of stylistic devices and stylistic virtues meets the expectations one has of a ‘theory’. The review then goes on to interpret the semantics and semiotics of ancient treatises in stylistics in terms of present-day linguistic pragmatics. Finally, on the basis of the writings discussed in the book, the main tendency of the ancient history of rhetorics is identified and some conclusions for modern stylistic research are drawn.
Laczkó, Krisztina: Basic elements of morphology. The paper is a chapter of ‘Hungarian Grammar’ (Keszler, Borbála 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.
The present chapter offers a general introduction to morphological studies. It introduces basic morphological categories such as minimal sign, morph, morpheme, and allomorph, roots and affixes, etc. It deals with the problem of segmentation, lexical versus grammatical meaning, free and bound morphemes, semi-affixes and combining forms. The paper aims to give a summary of the most general issues in Hungarian morphology.
Balogh, Judit: Attributes and appositions. This paper deals with attributive adjectives, proposing a slightly different classification from what is found in other grammars. Thus, the author establishes the classes of ‘attributes of qualification’ (comprising traditional attributes of quality and attributes of quantity), ‘attributes of demonstrative identification’, and ‘attributes of possession’.
She discusses appositive complements as distinct from attributes and shows that only one type of appositions, also known as postposed attributes, can be related to attributes proper, although the apposition cannot be seen as a kind of attribute even in such constructions. A separate section treats the grammatical status of apposition, concluding that it is not a sentence constituent but rather a position, and that appositive constructions are a transitional category between subordinate and coordinate constructions.
Harka, Ákos: Names of fish in the Tiszafüred region. The author has been observing the fish stock of the river Tisza in the region of the Tisza Lake since 1970. He has been in close contact with fishermen of the area and he often went fishing with them at dawn. His informants had learned the trade from their fathers. – The part of the river concerned was turned into an artificial lake in 1978. Fishing rights were conferred onto the organization of anglers. Large-scale fishing first became a ‘tolerated’ type of activity and then was put an end to a few years ago. Since then, local fish names are less and less used. The author undertook to save them from oblivion. In his survey, he gives a taxonomic list of the species of fish known in the Tiszafüred region. Each item contains the Hungarian name of the species as used in specialized discourse, then the (Latin) technical term, followed by the set of local names, some of which are accompanied by quotations of etymological remarks given by the informants themselves.
Banczerowski, Janusz: Linguistic meaning and human knowledge. The author discusses the problems of referential (objective) semantics in opposition to cognitive semantics. The knowledge of the denoted phenomena makes it possible to understand permanent metaphorization in the process of linguistic communication. Linguistic meaning (knowledge of extension and intension) is argued to contain a certain semantic potentiality (associational possibility), too.
Elekfi, László: Part-of-speech proportions in the Hungarian word stock as reflected in the ‘Dictionary of Hungarian Inflexions’. The ordered data base that the Dictionary of Hungarian Inflexions is based on makes it possible to give a more exact calculation of the number of entries in the Concise Hungarian Explaining Dictionary (CHED). The correct number is less than the estimated seventy thousand that has been in circulation so far: it is approximately 65 600. This figure, calculated additively, confirms the earlier claim that more than half of the headwords of any dictionary are nouns. Why the proportion of nouns is higher in the CHED than in the seven-volume Hungarian Explaining Dictionary requires further research. It is probable that the CHED has increased the set of specialized vocabulary items primarily by nouns. The proportion of verbs is at most one fourth, that of adjectives is less than one eighth of the number of headwords. The number of nominal meanings is even higher, given that more than 4% of the headwords are double-class items one of whose word classes is a noun. The headwords belonging to other parts of speech are not very numerous but double-class and multi-class items occur in a wide variety of combinations. A comparison of lexical proportions with text frequency data reveals that the relative frequency of conjunctions or pronouns is characteristic of texts in general and usage as a whole, whereas that of verbs is genre and speaker specific. The paper demonstrates how diverse and multifarious statistical results can be gained from a traditional non-computerized database.
Hell, György: Traditional and ‘New Hungarian Grammar’. The article addresses the problem of how non-traditional syntactic descriptions can be understood with a traditional background. It is difficult to demarcate the two approaches strictly because several ideas of structuralist research (like the phoneme and other achievements of the Prague School) have been incorporated in traditional grammars, too. Substantial differences nevertheless exist (a) in the application of results obtained from a logical analysis of natural languages, (b) in the way deep structures are construed, and (c) with respect to the usefulness of immediate constituent analysis in syntactic description.
The latest investigations based on generative principles yielded some new and interesting results in Hungarian syntax but their application for teaching purposes requires a broader perspective on the problems involved.