The paper presents the key tenets of a novel approach to the structure of Hungarian clauses that combines aspects of cognitive linguistics and dependency grammar. Clauses are given a multigraph description (as in XDG), with separate semantic graphs dedicated to frame semantic relations (S1), speech function (S2) and contextualization (S3). These stand in symbolic association with formal dimensions pertaining to morphology (F1), word order (F2) and prosody (F3). It is shown that the finite verb, or a catena of elements including the verb, is central for both S1 and S2, functioning as a 'clause within the clause'. Further, the clause is shown to manifest modularity, whereby a single node in one dimension may correspond to a catena of interconnected elements in another. 1 As Langacker (2008: 6) puts it, "all valid grammatical constructs are symbolic, hence reducible to form-meaning pairings". 2 CDG is different from Hudson's Word Grammar (WG) (Hudson, 1990(Hudson, , 2007(Hudson, , 2010, which is also CL-oriented and dependency-based, by more closely following a Langackerian conception of cognitive linguistics (Langacker, 1987(Langacker, , 2008. 3 For example, instead of the notion of "focus", I work with the concept of "overriding" (see Section 3.1), and "topic" is treated as a subtype of "contextualizers" (3.2). Instead of asking questions such as what position a constituent "occupies" or "moves into", both the function and the form (e.g. linearization) of elements are defined in relational terms, with respect to other elements in the syntagmatic chain.
The paper presents the syntactic work of Sámuel Brassai with special regard to his dependency-based theory of the sentence. Brassai is already relatively well-known as a pioneer in the study of information structure, where his discoveries predate Gabelentz by several years. The present work aims to show that Brassai also developed a consistently dependency-based theory of syntax long before Tesnière. The paper first discusses the motivations and influences underpinning Brassai’s work. Secondly, it presents Brassai’s verb-centred theory, expressed both metaphorically and by sentence diagrams. The latter appeared as early as 1873, thus Brassai may well have been the first to produce verb-centred dependency diagrams of clause structure. Finally, we show that Brassai’s discovery of a bipartite (information structural) division of the sentence does not amount to an early adoption of constituency; rather, it is seamlessly integrated into his dependency-oriented approach.
The paper combines the assumptions of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Dependency Grammar, arguing for an analysis of clauses as multi-dimensional networks. The semantic pole of each dimension is a network of semantic relations, which stands in correspondence to formal aspects of clause structure such as case morphology, word order and prosody. The proposed approach is applied to the study of core phenomena of Hungarian. The D1 dimension of Hungarian finite clauses is concerned with frame semantic (“thematic”) relations and their coding (primarily by morphology) on the formal side. The D2 and D3 dimensions pertain to speech function and contextualization, respectively, with the semantic relations marked by word order and prosody. It is hoped that the proposed account of Hungarian may inform both cross-linguistic comparisons and theory development in cognitive linguistics.
A tanulmány előzményét képező cikk célja az volt, hogy kimutassa a hagyományos iskolai mondatelemzés egyes továbbgondolást igénylő vonásait (miközben annak előnyeit is hangsúlyozta). A jelen írás olyan lehetséges forgatókönyveket tárgyal, amelyek az iskolai mondatelemzés jövőjét alakíthatják. Az explicit mondatelemzés visszaszorítása és a hagyományos elemzés generatívval való felváltása egyaránt előnytelennek látszik. Ezek helyett a cikk a hagyomány újító megőrzésére tesz javaslatot. Egy olyan, kognitív nyelvészeti alapokon nyugvó mondattant vázol fel, amely a kontextuális körülmények közötti jelentésképzésből indul ki, az állítmány helyett a magmondat fogalmát alkalmazza, és több dimenzióban vizsgálja a mondatalkotó elemek közötti viszonyokat.
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