Magyar Nyelvőr

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.