Semantic motivation in word formations of the language reform movement

Abstract

From the last decades of the 18 th century on to the 1840s, a cultural movement intended to “re-vitalise” the Hungarian language, i.e. to update its lexicon and semantic networks in order to cope with recent European intellectual, economic and technical innovations. The present paper focuses on non-spontaneous word formations invented by the language reform movement, presented as instantiations of universal modes of construal also adopted in Hungarian. The noun fogalom ’concept’ is partly a calque, partly a result of metaphorisation, anyag ’material’ is a calque, könnyelmű ’light-minded’ represents conceptual integration (blend), while alak ’ form’ marks the renovation of an obsolete Hungarian word. Each semantic structure is conceptually strongly motivated, providing sufficient reason for the language reformers to invent these lexemes. A much larger part of words created by the language reform movement conforms to conventionalised conceptual and linguistic construal patterns of Hungarian (to the “nature of the Hungarian language”) than has been recognised in the specialised literature on the basis of evaluative criteria. The semantic analyses show
that artificial word formation follows general cognitive schemas, albeit with a naïve linguistic knowledge.