Studia Linguistica Hungarica

Studia Linguistica Hungarica 35 (2023)

Authors — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Studia Linguistica Hungarica was originally a yearbook of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), under the full title of Annales Universitatis Scientiarium Budapestiensis de Rolando Eötvös Nominatae, Sectio linguistica. It formed part of a collection of university yearbooks in various disciplines, and served the purpose of making the results of ELTE-based research in linguistics available to an international audience beyond the iron curtain. The first volume of the yearbook appeared in 1970, and a total of 26 volumes were published by 2005. From 1990, financial problems hindered year-by-year appearance.

Throughout this period, Annales was edited by Prof. István Szathmári. The articles were written in a variety of languages including English, German, French, Latin, Russian, Spanish, and others. Thematically, they covered the most diverse fields of research on a wide range of languages.

The journal now re-appears with a new title, new editorial and advisory boards, and under very different circumstances. Studia Linguistica Hungarica publishes peer reviewed papers with a thematic focus on Hungarian and a general theoretical and typological orientation. Contributions adopting a usage-based cognitive theoretical perspective are especially, but not exclusively, welcome. The thematic scope of the journal ranges from semantics, syntax, and phonology to pragmatics, text linguistics and stylistics, from both descriptive and historical viewpoints. A single issue is published per year, with papers written in English.

The role of discursive structure in the genre specification of online discourses

Júlia Ballagó — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The paper starts with the assumption that each time people engage in discourses, they perform social actions in order to adaptively satisfy their communicative purposes and needs (cf. Verschueren–Brisard 2009; Steen 2011; Giltrow 2013). Moreover, these social actions form types in accordance with the typical co-occurrences of typical discourse situations involving typical roles, typical themes and typical communicative goals tar- geted by discourse participants (cf. Bakhtin 1986). These typical co-occurrences serve as ground for the functioning of genre knowledge and result in typical patterns of construal.

In this paper, I present a two-pronged empirical study that reveals the role of discursive structure in the creation of the genre-specific character of online discourses. By discursive structural units, I mean discourse segments (usually larger than one sentence but smaller than the entire discourse) used by the speaker to accomplish a communicative strategy aimed at achieving a more specific communicative purpose. During the research, I used two types of data. On the one hand, I compiled a research corpus consisting of 50 online recipes and 50 online book reviews in Hungarian. On the other hand, I conducted an experiment in which one group of Hungarian native speaker informants (25 persons) had to create a recipe for a good novel, while another group of informants (25 persons) had to write a review of a given recipe. The research thus focused on the genres of recipe and (book) review. I performed corpus-based qualitative analyses on both datasets using the MAXQDA software. After carefully developing a data-driven annotation system on a smaller pilot material, I systematically identified the communicative strategic units of both the non-elicited and the elicited dataset [cf. Swales’s (1990) move structure analysis]. The research findings are as follows: (i) Discursive structure formed by the speaker’s communicative strategies is a genre-marking quality of the online discourses under study. (ii) Recipes written by laypersons and professionals do not have a different discursive structure but the identified discursive structure is very clearly manifested. (iii) Book reviews written by lay readers differ significantly from those written by professional critics in terms of discursive structure and this sharp differentiation reveals a separation between two more specific genres, i.e. amateur book review and professional critique.

Politeness metadiscourses in the practice of Hungarian language consulting

Ágnes Domonkosi, Zsófia Ludányi — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The paper presents how problems of linguistic politeness are reflected in the practice of institutional language consulting. The research analyses questions and answers on linguistic politeness in the database of emails from the Language Consulting Service of the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics. Through an in-depth analysis of a selected e-mail, the paper shows that uncertainties about linguistic politeness (forms of address, greetings) are typically formulated as issues requiring normative guidance. The analysis of the consultant’s answer also shows that in the case of politeness questions the language consulting strategy requires, in addition to knowledge of scientific findings, an awareness of the community’s politeness, an understanding of the socio-cultural situation and environment of the inquirer, and an identification of his/her linguistic and social attitudes.

A linguistic analysis of teacher trainees’ reflective journals

Zsuzsa Gonda — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Since the year 2000, there has been an increasingly noteworthy emphasis on fostering reflective thinking among teacher trainees in Hungary as well. One instrumental approach for enhancing reflective thinking is through the use of reflective journals. These reflective journals encompass idiomatic representations of metacognitive processes that not only ponder over actions but also consider linguistic usage. Metacognitive-reflexive procedures and facets of metapragmatic awareness become linguistically explicit within the confines of reflective journals. The research inquiries in this study are as follows: how can we ascertain the reflective nature of examined texts, how can sentences in the journals be linked to various levels of reflectivity, and what types of linguistic components serve as illustrative markers of reflexive discourse. The present investigation scrutinises the reflective journals of 20 university students from a pedagogical and functional cognitive pragmatics perspective, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods for content and text analysis. Identifying linguistic elements that convey reflexivity has the potential to heighten the consciousness of teacher trainees regarding their use of reflexive language and deepen their reflective thinking processes.

Polish language policy on the rights to mother tongue education

Gergely Hladonik — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The study focuses on the significant events that influenced the role and status of minority languages in Poland. Further on, it discusses the Polish Language Act and its influence on the rights to mother-tongue education. The Polish Language Act has been used in a variety of ways to protect and preserve minorities as well as the Polish national language. As a result, important actions have been taken by the relevant groups and authorities, which are included in the article. The ratification of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages is a key element in the integration of the European Union. Poland signed the Charter in 2003 and
ratified it in 2009. In 2021, Poland submitted its third evaluation report. Using critical analysis, the researcher examined this report. The collected data suggest that significant changes are needed at all levels of education for several minorities.

A critical analysis of the construction of Turkish national identity

Károly Nagy — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates the relationship between argumentation and political discourse. More specifically, this study focuses on the discursive and argumentative strategies employed by one of the most prominent Turkish leaders and current ruling president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The aim is to shed light on linguistic elements that fuel the sense of national identity after the coup attempt of 2016 through employing the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) for unveiling the use of specific argumentative strategies in the translated version of Erdogan’s 2016 Republic Day speech. English's growing presence in politics highly influences translation practices (House 2013). Not all politicians are proficient in English, thus, their speeches undergo translation from their native language. These translated speeches are intended for a global audience, which underscores the pivotal role of English analysis in both political discourse and the field of translation studies. Although the original language of the speech is Turkish, the examination of its English translation serves to highlight the significance of analysing translated political speeches and making these analyses accessible to a wider audience. The findings emphasise the importance of argumentative topics (topoi), such as the topos of History, Definition, Comparison, Threat and Favoruable Time in the advocation of national sentiment at various linguistic and structural levels within the translated political speech of Erdoğan. The implications of this research extend to the understanding of the intricate interplay between argumentative language and concepts of national sentiment within political discourse. Future research can further explore the application of
DHA in the analysis of political discourse, allowing for deeper insights into the communicative strategies employed by political leaders.

Code-switching as a natural phenomenon among learners of foreign languages

Áron Szijártó — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Code-switching has long been regarded as a detrimental effect of being able to speak more than one foreign language. It is a widely accepted fact that the simultaneous acquisition of two or more foreign languages will make students code-switch more often compared to those learning only one foreign language at a time. Contrary to the common misconception that bi- or multilingualism through instruction would be any different in contrast to bi- or multilingualism acquired at home, bi- or multilinguals’ languages “act” similarly regardless of how they have been acquired. Code-switching can impede and aid foreign language learning at the same time. If code-switching is considered a phenomenon that should be avoided, some EFL teachers tend to make conscious steps to help students discard their code-switches. However, if code-switching is treated as it is, merely a natural phenomenon occurring to multilinguals, then, instead of needing to fix it, it can simply be observed. On the one hand, this study summarises some general findings about code-switching, which can also be observed among students born into monolingual families. The second part of the study is a linguistic analysis of a German L2 – English L3 code-switching phenomenon among Hungarian learners of English. The
third part of this paper is an educational outlook highlighting the challenges faced by learners, especially young multilinguals.

How can a black horse have brown fur?

Katarzyna Szymanowska-Ciepły — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hungarian equine coat colour-related terminology is a largely unresearched subject. Its unique situation as a rapidly developing jargon results in multiple nomenclatural systems used simultaneously in the specialised literature. The analysis of the nomenclatural systems’ inner structure suggests the usage of two differing methods of categorisation, one based on the visual properties of the subject, the other based on non-visual genetic factors of the described animal.

The paper reviews the colour categories’ main traits that influence their categorisation process and compares them with the Hungarian equine coat colours’ characteristics. The comparison reveals that Hungarian equine coat colour terms are in many ways similar to the conventional colour terms, but due to their differences they create a separate colour-motivated class of specialised terms.

The analytic part focuses on the different methods of categorisation present in the various nomenclatural systems in the equine coat colour related literature. It defines their main features and the underlying cause of their existence. It explores the division of the nomenclatural systems in accordance with their categorisation process and provides a detailed description of the traits of both traditional and modern nomenclatural systems discussing them on the basis of specific examples.

The further part of the analysis explores the semantic relationship between the conventional colours and the equine coat colours in the context of equine coat colour terms sharing their forms with Basic Colour Terms.

The research material consists of a database of Hungarian equine coat colour-related terms, gathered from a variety of zootechnical, sport and hobby literature and commonly available internet sources on the topic. The nomenclatural systems presented in the sources are visualised in the form of diagrams, illustrating the meaning of individual terms and the systems’ internal hierarchies.

The presented findings showcase the complexity of the specialised colour-motivated terms and their difference from the conventional colour terms. They present how external, non-linguistic factors like the development of the natural sciences may influence the relatively hermetic colour-motivated terminology.