Nyelv és stílus
Rhetorical analysis has revealed some hitherto unnoticed features in Jókai’s earliest short stories. Direct communication with the readers already shows up in his very first stories: he employs addressing the readers; narrative metalepsis that gets the readers involved in the plot; questions that direct the readers’ attention and raise their curiosity – these are not mannerisms or superfluous flourishes but means of maintaining contact that is a typical feature of rhetoric. Pace the professional common belief, Jókai does know how to compose a story. A number of structures can be found in his stories, depending on the content to be conveyed: linear, fractal, puzzle-visional, mosaiclike, framed, descriptive, and lyrical. Such solutions, as attested by the literature of genre theory, are characteristic of twentieth-century short stories. In the introductions to his writings, or in the initial parts of their individual chapters, he often employs enthymeme, that is, probabilistic argumentation. This means that he starts from an opinion or truth held by common opinion, introducing the current case as an instance. Enthymeme is not only used as point of departure: often, it encompasses the whole story. In other words, it is not superfluous harangue as his critics often claim. All his appreciators emphasize his rhythmical prose, but it is rarely pointed out what it is that creates the rhythm of a prose text. It is primarily the figures of speech, in a wide range of varieties. Figures not only create the rhythm of a text, but they often also serve its wittiness. Also known in rhetoric as acumen, such wittiness is highly characteristic of his prose. It is time we re-read and re-appraised Jókai’s stories, in terms of the ideas and aesthetic sense of his own and of his contemporaries, rather than those of later periods.
rhetorical analysis, rhetorical situation, structure, argumentation, enthymeme, figures of speech
Nyelv és iskola
The aim of this paper is to analyse how the three elements of classical persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos work in a unique speech genre. The campaign speeches of a Hungarian nonformal educational institution, the Young Talents Programme of Mathias Corvinus Collegium, aim to convince a heterogeneously targeted audience: parents, teachers and students at the same time about the advantages of the programme. The speeches examined show characteristics of two speech genres simultaneously: the deliberative genre (genus deliberativum) and the epideictic genre (genus demonstrativum). The analysis comes to the conclusion that ethos-based persuasion within the speeches and the logical devices of persuasion principally attempt to involve the adult audience, while pathosbased elements of the speeches are mostly targeted at the students.
rhetoric, non-formal education, persuasion, ethos, pathos, logos, speech genres
A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből
The present paper forms part of a cognitive semantic study exploring misunderstandings in Hungarian discourses. Research on misunderstandings can be traced back to the tradition of Aristotelian logic, on the basis of which they have been treated as instances of false inference in the literature. At the same time, scholars now seem to agree that false inferences result from both semantic and pragmatic factors. However, in this theoretical approach, misunderstanding has not yet been systematically distinguished from misleading and purposeful misinterpretation, with the difference between conceptual misunderstanding and purely logical mistakes also awaiting clarification. The introductory part of the paper offers an interpretation of misunderstanding along these lines in a cognitive semantic framework, and spells out the study’s theoretical background assumptions. This is followed by a case study which assigns a key role to linguistic intuition and introspection in both the emergence and elimination of misunderstanding.
cognitive semantics, misunderstanding, conceptual approach, misleading, misinterpretation, intuition and introspection, case study
In the competitive world of advertising, entertainment and humour are increasingly important for grabbing the viewers’ attention and enhancing entrenchment of information. In this paper, I study humorous linguistic and visual devices in advertisements of the 2019 Super Bowl. My goal is to explore how verbal and visual figures serve as means of making a humorous effect, grabbing the viewers’ attention and inducing a higher level of entrenchment. The analysis presents the relationship between sports and advertising, explicates the notion of figures, and also discusses their role in advertisements. The empirical material of the research is supplied by three billboards and a televised advertisement promoting the Super Bowl final.
figures, imagery, advertisement, sports event, Super Bowl
In the pages of Posonyi kert [A Garden in Pressburg, 1664–1667] by János Lippay, a special Hungarian word form often crops up. The form lévél prompts questions about its structure, meaning, and origin. That such questions also arose earlier on is shown by the fact that Szarvas and Simonyi’s dictionary devotes a separate entry to it, and that as many as three articles discuss it in the 12th volume of Magyar Nyelvőr (1883). The present paper reviews the claims made over a century ago, complements them by a few more recent data and draws conclusions from them. In present-day terminology, the term habitual would cover the meaning of lévél: it expresses situations that characterize a lengthy time interval such that they can be seen as a characteristic feature of the whole interval. In lévél, the stem lév- ‘be’ occurs with the frequentative-durative suffix -l, motivating the habitual character of the form. Items of this type have usually been grammaticalized into auxiliaries or other morpheme-level markers, but lévél has a main verb role, thus no category shift accompanies its special function. In Lippay’s writing, lévél does not only correspond to the construction szokott lenni ‘usually is/was’: it appears to be categorically present in this function. On the other hand, in some 18th-century data, the more general meaning ‘was’ also proved feasible, in addition to the expression of usualness. On the basis of dialect dictionaries and descriptions of the phonological systems of certain dialects, it can be said that the form lévél may not have been eliminated from use until the very recent past (it may have been characteristically present primarily in the North-Eastern region earlier on, too).
Hungarian historical linguistics, morphosyntactic variation, habitual meaning, grammaticalization, geographical variant
In this paper I investigate the relations between verb meaning and syntactic structure. I mainly deal with the question of how the verb determines syntactic structure. Verb meaning determines what arguments and how many arguments should there be in the sentence: the verb obligatorily requires the presence of some arguments in the syntactic structure, while it merely allows for the presence of other arguments optionally. In the case of polysemous verbs, the presence or absence of a specific argument in the argument structure determines the actual verb meaning. The thematic roles of an event are portrayed in the syntactic structure by the arguments. These arguments are included in the verb meaning schematically. In the case of polysemous verbs, there are differences between the semantic structures of a verb’s two meanings. These differences affect the schematic figures in the verb meaning: their number, their relations with each other, and the extent to which they are specified or elaborated. These factors determine the number and syntactic roles of the arguments, and the degree of their obligatory presence in the argument structure. The argument structures of two synonymous verbs are highly similar.
argument structure, verb, polysemous verbs, synonymous verbs, syntax
Creating an up-to-date Hungarian national lexicographic database requires financial and human resources. Such an endeavour has three components: a bibliography of dictionaries, a bibliography of lexicographic works, and connecting those items in the two bibliographies which are related to each other. The year 2022 will be the centenary year of the publication of A magyar szótárak és nyelvtanok könyvészete (= A bibliography of Hungarian dictionaries and grammars) by István Sági. This centenary offers motivation for updating A magyar szótárirodalom bibliográfiája (= A bibliography of Hungarian lexicography) by Tamás Magay, dealing with general dictionaries and published in 2011. Such updating involves making up for a 10- to 12-year natural backlog and the omissions of the original work, and storing the entire database electronically. My proposal does not cast its net as wide as necessary, but the work can be realized in the next year and a half and it must fit into “a great bibliography of Hungarian lexicography” to be created in the future. The proposed electronic data set should harmonize with the existing database of Hungarian technical dictionaries and should make the best possible use of the bibliographic data of the National Széchényi Library.
Hungarian lexicography, A bibliography of Hungarian dictionaries (2011), reasons for updating, data collection, database of Hungarian technical dictionaries, National Széchényi Library
Szó- és szólásmagyarázatok
Szemle
A Nyelvőr hírei