The author wishes to contribute to an exploration of the situation of Hungarian dialectology in a sociology-of-research perspective. The following areas are zoomed in on: institutions where Hungarian dialectology is practised; the organization and organicity of Hungarian dialectology; the pressure group potential of dialectology in Hungary; the appreciation of dialectology in Hungarian linguistics; and the teaching of Hungarian dialectology in colleges and universities. Also discussed are the need to form a dialectological research team, the recent radical change in the status of dialects in this country, and the fate of the vast amount of recorded dialect material that has been amassed, including the puzzle of what to do with it.

Keywords: dialectology, sociology of research, panorama of Hungarian dialectology; institutions and teaching of Hungarian dialectology.

Kiss Jenő
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

The typology of changes in the history of Hungarian family names

The aim of this paper is to take stock of, and briefly introduce, the various types of change that family names (that are essentially lexical items, proper names in particular, that can be inherited) may undergo in the Hungarian linguistic and cultural context. The paper proposes that earlier frameworks of typological description should be expanded: first, certain types of change should be added; and second, artificial changes of names should be included alongside natural ones. The types of change to be described are as follows: 1. complex changes (the emergence and disappearance of certain names); 2. entire changes (abandoning an old name and assuming a new one); 3. partial and regular structural changes (those of syntactic or morphological structure); 4. partial and irregular structural changes (formal vs. semantic ones). In addition, further – albeit different – types of change are also worth considering: 5. partial formal changes (in writing or in speech only); 6. other, special, nonformal changes (of the semantic structure and/or pragmatic status of a proper noun). This typology of changes is necessarily language specific in some respects; but in other respects, especially in its major directions, it can draw the reader’s attention to more general types and tendencies of change.

Keywords: history of Hungarian family names, typology of change, change of name, variants of names, artificial name, natural name.

Farkas Tamás
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

New attempts at classifying figures of speech

The author makes an attempt at refining and deepening the classification of the types of figures of speech as it has emerged so far from the Hungarian stylistics literature. In doing so, he reconsiders and revises some of his own former ideas, too. The major claims of the paper can be summarised as follows: 1. A distinction has to be made between similes and tropes: the former refer to similarity, the latter to identity; 2. within the group of tropes, “circumscriptive” tropes have to be separated from the betterknown non-circumscriptive ones; 3. tropes have two basic types: metaphor and metonymy (in this, the author follows the ideas of Roman Jakobson); and 4. general (common) types of similes and tropes have to be distinguished from the following special subtypes: personifying, objectifying, cross-sense, and name-replacing; the prototypical implementations of the latter are personification, objectification, synaesthesia, and antonomasia, respectively. The final section of the paper briefly discusses the possibility of another kind of classification that is based on the presence vs. absence of the four components identified by Gérard Genette (object, image, motive, modalizer), rather than on the semantic relationship between the object (of similarity/identification) and the image (to which it is said to be similar/identical).

Keywords: figurativity, simile, trope, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, objectification, synaesthesia, antonomasia.

Kemény Gábor
MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet
Miskolci Egyetem

The linguistic image of time and temporal attitudes
A linguistic and cultural approach

The present paper approaches the concept of time from a variety of angles. It briefly discusses the way time as a phenomenon and its human perception are seen within theoretical physics and brain research, respectively; it offers numerous examples of the linguistic image of time; it tries to clarify the reasons of variation in the attitudes to time in a number of different languages and cultures; and it illustrates the foregoing via examples taken from a variety of languages and cultures.

Keywords: the image of time in language, handling of time, perception of time, linguistic world view, anthropological linguistics.

Pátrovics Péter
Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem