Magyar Nyelvőr

Bańczerowski, Janusz: Metainformational verbs describing the patterns of receiving information, the effects it makes on the receiver, and the state of the memory of the information receiving device
For a receiver to take in information (s)he needs a certain disposition that is mainly dependent on the kind of information to be received and the amount of noise occurring in the channel of transmission. The communicative activity of the receiver does not start when information is directly transmitted to his/her receptors: it starts a lot earlier. The receiver has to get disposed to receiving information and has to select the channel through which information will flow to him/her. Such disposition, with respect to the kind of channel, is reflected by verbs whose semantic structure can be described as follows:
VERB = EFFORT (DISPOSITION) TO RECEIVE INFORMATION + EMPLOYMENT OF THE SENSES + METAINFORMATIONAL SURPLUS
The content of the metainformational surplus can be demonstrated mainly by an analysis of Hungarian verbs referring to the visual and auditory channels.
Linguistic utterances serve a number of functions in the process of communication. They do not only transmit the fundamental information but they also make various effects on the receiver so that (s)he changes his/her state according to the intentions of the sender. In order to do that, they employ various metainformational verbs. In the present paper, five types of such Hungarian verbs are analysed.