Verb-semantic groups in the Corpus of Hungarian Lyrical Poetry

The distribution of mental verbs in the subcorpora

Abstract

The Corpus of Hungarian Lyrical Poetry, compromising four subcorpora containing texts related to contemporary and canonical Hungarian lyricism, is of sufficient size to facilitate detailed qualitative analyses of verb semantics (Horváth et al. 2025). As lyrical discourses feature fictional apostrophe, the presence of apostrophic speakers allows for research not only on emotions but also further mental states that are in the semantic category of mental verbs.

The category of mental verbs as a verb-semantic class has appeared both in Hungarian and international scholarship over the past thirty years, following a traditionally inherited definition, while corpus-based definitions supported by empirical examples remain scarce. In this study, I present possibilities for the qualitative analysis of mental verbs within the Corpus of Hungarian Lyrical Poetry, revealing that the generic characteristics of the individual subcorpora also become examinable through the integration of verb-semantic analysis. My study can be interpreted as pilot research contributing to a broader work that demonstrates the stylistic properties of the Corpus of Hungarian Lyrical Poetry.