Clause combining in Old Hungarian legends
Prose and verse, written and oral narratives in preaching
Abstract
The paper explores the ways in which the preaching situation shapes narration and, eventually, the forms of clause linkage, by presenting a few characteristic features of Hungarian, illustrated with early Hungarian linguistic material from the first half of the 16 th century. A comparison is made between the syntactic coding of three main coherence strands in three versions of the ’same’ narrative, the legend of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, based on a discourse approach to clause combining. A common Latin source text is taken into consideration as well. The exact differences in coding temporal, referent and action continuity are pointed out. It is shown that the differences in the communicative setting are indeed closely reflected in the chosen grammatical forms of clause integration. The results of the analysis shed light on the factors motivating the two opposing forces of elaboration and compression in clause linkage, which were already present in the Late Old Hungarian period. It is shown in the ensuing analysis that these factors correlate with written and oral text features, and genre differences of prose and verse.
The dominant author figure of the era was the translator-compiler-author educated in one of the religious orders in Hungary. Those preachers had helped to shape the linguistic norms of the different text types prevalent in the Middle Ages before linguistic standardization took place.
The discourse potential of time adverbial clauses as coherence bridges at thematic boundaries is shown to have already existed in the period. The type of clause used in the transition between the narrated actions and utterances shows the concise vs. loose nature
of event integration as it codes a phase of perceptive acknowledgement in the narration, potentially existing as a building block of an event. Its frequent occurrence signals a high degree of character foregrounding. Considering the written and oral features of the three
excerpts, the key concept is character foregrounding. The forms and degrees of giving prominence to the protagonist (Catherine) are mirrored in the explicitness of coding her linguistically. In the verse legend, there is a significant rise in the number of ’phoric pronouns’ used in the grammatical integration of subordinate clauses with their main clauses. This can be traced back to the rhythmical constraints of the genre, along with the tendency to uphold a one clause-one rhythmical unit correlation.
