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Magyar Nyelvőr131. évf. 2. sz. (2007. április-június)

Tartalom

Nyelvművelés

  • Gósy Mária :

    The Interrelations of Speech Perception and Speech Comprehension in Young Children

    Children's first-language perception base and the operative strategies of their perceptual processes take shape gradually from age one onwards. A large amount of research deals with the analysis of children's speech processing; however, this is the first comprehensive study of the speech perception processes of Hungarian two- and three-year-olds (based on 3360 data of 52 children, using seven subtests of the GMP diagnostic procedure). The goal of the present study was to characterize the organization of speech decoding processes, the interrelations of speech perception and comprehension, as well as the strategies children use in them. The analysis proved the existence of a strong top-down decoding process that is entirely different from adults' processes. There were no significant differences across age groups but significant differences were found depending on the individual decoding processes. Children's speech perception shows enormous individual variation. The results are important also in the practice of speech therapy.

  • Elekfi László :
    Költészet, helyesírás, gyorsírás [123.27 kB - PDF]EPA-00188-00047-0020

    Poetry, Orthography, Stenography

    Since the year 2000, the section on orthography of "SzóVilág" [The world of words], a journal for shorthand writers, typists and typographers, has been headed by Mária Zámbori, a volume of whose exquisite poems has recently been published. Both her pedagogical essays on the difficulties of orthography and her scholarly papers discussing the abbreviatory conventions of Hungarian stenography are characterised by a delicate humour and playfulness that also feature in her poems. Even though stenography is being supplanted by sound recording devices in many parts of the world and in most areas of life, it is nevertheless indispensable in Parliament, for instance.

    The Minutes of Parliament had not been marred by so many errors in fifty years as in the six months during which, for the sake of economy, professional stenographers were replaced by employees of the National Bureau of Translators to take shorthand of the speeches delivered in parliament. The activity of a stenographer putting down public speeches is not at all similar to that of a translator; if anything, it is closer to the work of a simultaneous interpreter.

  • Bősze Péter :

    Incidental Letters, Numbers, and Extensions in Medical-Biological Texts

    This paper gives a definition of, and summarizes orthographical issues related to, incidental letters/numbers/extensions. These are letters, numbers, and extensions appended to technical terms and forming an integral part of those. The given concepts, therefore, are not independently signalled without them, hence the name 'incidental'. Their coherence with the basic terms has to be indicated in writing, too, thus they are spelt solid (or hyphenated) with the basic term or acronym, etc. They significantly differ from attributive letters, numbers, and extensions, respectively; the latter are not part of the concepts referred to but merely convey additional information on some of their properties.

Nyelv és stílus

  • Szathmári István :

    Albert Szenczi MolnáR's Dictionaries and Their Role in The Emergence of Standard Literary Hungarian

    1. Szenczi Molnár's various activities advancing the emergence of SLH (his grammar, his hymn book, his emendation of Gáspár Károli's translation of the Bible, and his own translation of Calvin's Institutio).

    2. A brief and practical review of his dictionaries.

    3. The signs of linguistic unification in formal linguistic characteristics of his dictionaries, with respect to the various editions and the occasional alterations therein.

    4. The issue whether, in what can be called the linguistic content elements, two important features of literary language as defined by the Linguistics Circle of Prague are observable:
    a) the versatility (plurifunctionalism) of linguistic devices and their concomitant wider differentiation, as well as
    b) intellectualization, that is, the elaboration of – mainly lexical and syntactic – devices that make the given language fit for representing higher levels of abstraction, and a more exact expression of the logical process and complexity of thinking.

    5. Summary.

Nyelv és iskola

  • Laczkó Mária :

    The Speech of Today's Teenagers Characterized in Terms of Their Choice of Words

    The speech of the coming generations can be criticized on a number of counts. Their difficulties of self-expression, their troubles with written communication, their articulation problems, the acceleration of their speech tempo are sadly experienced by teachers, and can be observed in everyday communicative situations.

    In this paper, we investigate the usage of words in, and stylistic characteristics of, teenagers' spontaneous conversation. We also try to find out what word formation processes they use preferentially, as well as how the language created by internet communication emerges in their oral and written utterances and what possible consequences all that may have.

A nyelvtudomány műhelyéből

  • Nyomárkay István :

    Language Reforms in Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century

    In Central and Southern Europe, conscious and planned language reform movements started to unfold in the late eighteenth century, culminating in the middle of the nineteenth. The emergence of specialized terminologies of Czech, Hungarian, and Croatian (as well as, to some extent, of Serbian) shows a number of similarities. Their mental roots can be found in the ideas of the enlightenment.

    Their fundamental aim was to express, in the respective mother tongues, the new terms of civilization in the broadest sense. That aim was served by the language reform movements whose earliest significant results were embodied in German-based terminological dictionaries of the various Slavonic languages published in the mid-nineteenth century. This paper deals with the reasons, antecedents, and results of those movements.

  • Imrényi András :

    Experimental Models of Hungarian Word Order

    1. Optimality Theory

    The first part of a two-part series, this study outlines an experimental model of Hungarian word order in the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). While Hungarian syntax has been widely and thoroughly studied by representatives of mainstream generative theory, little effort has been made to challenge successive models of this influential paradigm. Applying a radical version of syntactic OT proposed by Newson (2000, 2004), the present work abandons phrase structure representations to rely solely on a purely optimality theoretic device, a set of violable alignment constraints governing linear relations between individual words.

  • Kugler Nóra :

    An Investigation of the Epistemic Functions of Talan "Perhaps" on a Corpus of Spoken Language

    This paper investigates the functions of the epistemic stance adverb talan "perhaps" both on the basis of a corpus of written texts and on that of spoken utterances. The comparison revealed differences between the two text types (1) in the frequency of occurrence of talan, (2) in the presence or lack of certain functions, and (3) in the proportions of functions that are present in both corpora.

    (1) The lexeme talan occurred approximately 3.5 times as often in the"spoken" text type as in the "written" corpus. (2) Accumulation of stance adverbs, postposed talan, and overt quotative evidence only occurred in the spoken corpus, whereas it was only in the written corpus that an accumulation of several possible assumptions was indicated by talan. (3) Spoken texts were characterized by clause-initial position, the politeness function, and indication of indirect speech acts by talan to a higher extent; written texts more often exhibited the epistemic function of talan and its role in making statements vaguer.

    The testing of the various functions of stance adverbs may be facilitated by the observation that talan, in its epistemic function, can be replaced by another stance adverb of a similar modal strength (e.g., esetleg "maybe", feltehetőleg "presumably", valoszinűleg "probably"); in its nonmodal, pragmatic functions, however, it can only be substituted for by esetleg.

  • Bańczerowski Janusz :

    The Notion of 'Family' in the Linguistic Image of the World (As Reflected in a Questionnaire Study on Hungarian)

    In this paper, the authors present dictionary definitions of the notion 'family' and then they analyse the results of a questionnaire survey consisting of 193 positions. The questionnaire contained twelve questions, four of which concerned the age, gender, educational level, and type of domicile of the subjects. The rest of the questions were as follows: 1. What does the word 'family' mean to you? 2. The major characteristics of a family (list as many as you can). 3. What objects do you associate with the family? 4. What is a typical Hungarian family like? 5. What is the ideal family like? 6. What is the family good for? 7. What persons does a family consist of? 8. What songs, proverbs, etc. do you know that refer to the family? It is worth pointing out that the subjects primarily took family members to include father, mother, and child(ren), but they often also mentioned grandparents or all one's relatives, including godparents. Some subjects even listed dogs, cats, and other pets, too. Of the functions of the family, the following were mentioned: 1. nurturing function, 2. nursing function, 3. socio-cultural function, 4. economic function, 5. biological function. The typical Hungarian family was given an unfavourable description by most subjects.

    It is worth noting furthermore that when subjects intended to give a definition of 'family', they covered the usual lexicographic or encyclopaedic features but they additionally pointed out several novel features that are to be taken as 'necessary' (e.g., 'family' – 'home' ('house')) as they constitute a unified cognitive domain with the other conventional features. Such interpretation of the concept at hand differs from its dictionary definitions that are normally restricted to 'necessary and sufficient' features.

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