The authors of the publication under review, János Péntek and Attila Beno, present an objective picture of the situation of the Hungarian language in Romania (Transylvania). In 2020, this volume completed the series that had published the results of sociolinguistic research on the Hungarian language conducted in eight countries since 1998. This sixth sequel shows similarities and differences in comparison to the previously published volumes. Consistent with the other volumes of the series and the multidisciplinary nature of the topic, the eight main chapters of the book cover not only the presentation of the Hungarian language and community but also the external factors determining the operating conditions of the language as well as the resulting processes and characteristics of language/language use. Despite the differences observed in the situation of the Hungarian language in Romania, the publication points out several sociolinguistic and bilingualism-based universals that appear in the same or similar form in the other external regions, as well.

Keywords: the situation of the Hungarian language in Romania (Transylvania), sociolinguistic research, minority language, language policy situation, the code set and bilingualism of the Hungarian community in Transylvania.

Sándor Anna
Nyitrai Konstantin Filozófus Egyetem

This paper discusses the contradictory nature of the aspectual features of the delimitative verbal prefix el- ‘away’ and the temporal boundedness of the event expressed by the base verb together with its atelic nature. As a detailed analysis of the characteristics associated with the atelic – telic opposition confirmed that the two features are unsuitable for an appropriate description, the author used the concept of terminativity of Slavic aspect studies in an attempt to identify a set of verbs in aspectual terms. In line with similar approaches, the author divided terminativity, which means the general, external and internal temporal delimitation of events, into three groups: absolute telic, relative telic and simple terminative. The latter category is comprised of events that are only bounded in time. The three terminative groups provide a powerful tool to categorise not only delimitatives but also verbs of scalar change, the largest semantic group that reveals the relative nature of telicity: their non-prefixed versions belong to the relative subgroup, whereas those with a prefix belong to the absolute telic subgroup. This categorisation may be affected by the pragmatic circumstances.

Keywords: delimitatives, terminativity, telicity, temporal boundedness, verbs of scalar change.

Szili Katalin
Eperjesi Egyetem

Early Hungarian grammars and the Hungarian grammatical literature written in Latin contain numerous descriptions related to the Hungarian inventory of segments as a whole, or in the context of individual phonemes. One of the purposes of this paper is to present the terminology that grammar authors used to characterize the Hungarian segment inventory. The study also examines the origin and variations of the terminology in the works of the individual authors, as well as the contemporary assumptions about the set of segments, their articulation and the psychoacoustic image they evoke. Another purpose of the paper is to study how the results of modern experimental phonetics can correlate with the metaphorical descriptions applied by the early grammarians, and what kinds of articulatory-auditory experiences supported by experimental data may have led to the development of the terminology used for the characterization of segments.

Keywords: early Hungarian grammars, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, phonetic terminology, history of phonetics, Hungarian segments.

C. Vladár Zsuzsa
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

Markó Alexandra
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem
MTA–ELTE Lendület Lingvális Artikuláció Kutatócsoport

Classifiers are words indicating the class to which a noun belongs. They relate to properties such as animacy, humanness and shape, and typically combine with numerals and demonstratives. Classifiers are found in most languages of the world, and in many languages they constitute elaborated systems, e.g., in Chinese and many other languages of Southeast Asia. The two main types of classifiers are sortal and mensural classifiers. A sortal classifier is one which individuates whatever it refers to in terms of the kind of entity that it is. A mensural classifier is one which individuates in terms of quantity. The small system of Hungarian sortal classifiers is unique among the languages of Europe. The paper contains a distributional analysis of Hungarian classifiers, both sortal and mensural.

Keywords: parts of speech, classifier, distribution, polysemy.

Kicsi Sándor András

The paper aims to show, on the example of a well-known poem of Petofi, that the poetic function of language is not “the message oriented towards itself”. The structural elements of the poem examined (contrasts, correction, and hyperbole) are organically integrated with its semantic (intellectual and emotional) content and jointly render it a masterpiece of poetic art.

Keywords: structure and semantics of a poetic work.

Péter Mihály
ELTE Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem