This is an overview of research in syntax since the mid-1960’s, when a group of middle-aged professors introduced modern syntax in the curriculum and started to raise and support a number of young linguists in this country. Since then various avenues have opened up both in the variety of topics addressed and in international communication. Syntacticians from Hungary have been a constant feature in the linguistic scene at large. This paper, which was originally delivered as a keynote address at the 2020 meeting of the Society of Hungarian Linguistics, aims at tracking this development.

Keywords: syntax, generative linguistics, focus, word order, history of science.

Kenesei István
MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

The results of the absence of gender in the Hungarian language

This paper offers a brief survey of the presence of gender distinctions in the parts of speech of Indo-European languages, pointing out the fact that the absence of gender has changed the grammatical forms not only of the Hungarian pronouns but of all of the words connected to a noun in a nominal phrase. The syntagmatic structures based on grammatical agreement by gender influenced not only the moods of determination but also the predicative structure, causing the system of “double” constructions with the predicative attributes and appositions. Instead of these there are a lot of adverbal forms in Hungarian, but a sentence construction can have only one “subject” and one “object”, and Hungarian also has predicative syntagms with zero copula. While the order of these parts of the sentence depends on the functional sentence perspective (where all parts of the construction may be represented by the grammatical form of the predicate instead of pronouns), the word order of the adnominal constructions is strictly defined/fixed.

Keywords: gender, grammatical agreement, syntagmatic structures, copula, nominal phrases, adverbial structures, word order.

M. Korchmáros Valéria
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

The aim of this paper is to survey the stock of Lithuanian words of Hungarian origin. These lexemes made their way into Lithuanian mainly via Polish, or less often via German, Belorussian, or Russian, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Hungarian borrowings constitute well-defined thematic groups in Lithuanian. For instance, military terms related to the export of Hungarian military technology form a clear subset, as do words denoting agricultural products or manufactured goods transported from Hungarian territories to Poland or the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Of these lexemes, merely a small number have become part of the present-day literary word stock of Lithuanian, most of them are historical relics or dialectal items. Furthermore, a marked change of their meaning in Lithanian can also be observed in many cases.

Keywords: Lithuanian language, language contacts, lexical borrowings, loanwords of Hungarian origin, Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Laczházi Aranka
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

The paper presents some characteristic examples of lexical change in Hungarian lyric poetry of the past two centuries showing the approximation of poetic vocabulary to colloquial language. However, this process does not unavoidably indicate any kind of “depoetization” since all the poetic devices and contexts of the text strengthen and complement each other creating jointly the aesthetic value of the poem.

Keywords: poetic language, linguistic styles, poetic speech, poetic vocabulary, approximation to colloquial language.

Péter Mihály

The most important author in Hungarian literature and language use who is credited with the creation of Hungarian nonsense texts as a parody of normal language use is Frigyes Karinthy. This essay analyses one of his nonsense texts in terms of its phonology, morphology, syntax, and theme-rheme constructions and entropy. Karinthy partly uses the existing grammatical patterns and partly reinvents them; that is why the reader can assign fictitious meanings to his texts.

Keywords: nonsense, phonology, syntax, theme-rheme structure, entropy, fictitious meaning.

Büky László
Szegedi Tudományegyetem

This paper addresses a very important issue of cognitive linguistics that is also relevant for dialectology and geolinguistics: metaphors and the process of conceptualization that underlies them. I selected the maps of bajusza (a kukoricáé) ‘tassel (of corn)’ from both MNyA. (#42) and RMNyA. (#61). My questions refer to the motivations and the metaphoric relations in the background of some lexical and regional name variants (showing significant geolinguistic distribution in the Hungarian language territory) of the entry examined. To analyze metaphors, I apply the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff–Johnson 1980), which is a theoretical model in the (holistic) cognitive framework.

Keywords: kukorica bajusza ‘corn tassel’, categorical naming, regional name variants, metaphor research, cognitive (ethno)semantic examination, conceptual metaphor theory.

Ferenczi Gábor
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem
Magyarságkutató Intézet

Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s periodization of the history of Slavic languages, taking the end of the Common Slavic period to be in the 12th century, was known after the second world war, under the Soviet occupation of Hungary. It could be mentioned in university lectures and in textbooks, but it was rejected by Hungarian philologists without any argumentation. The author of the article supposes that the behavior of the Hungarian Slavists was determined in this respect, too, by the official attitude of the Soviet Union to the emigré Prince Trubetzkoy.

Keywords: Trubetzkoy, Common Slavic, periodization, history of Slavic studies in Hungary.

Zoltán András
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem