STUDYING LITERARY HUNGARIAN BY PRAGUEAN METHODS: ON THE BASIS OF PÁL MEDGYESI'S WORKS

• Authors: Szathmari Istvan
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

This paper investigates the way two features of the study of literary language by the Prague Linguistic Circle were anticipated in the work of a seventeenth-century Hungarian preacher, Pál Medgyesi. Those two features concern the polifunctionalism and concomitant differentiation of linguistic means, as well as what can be called intellectualisation, i.e., the elaboration of mainly lexical and syntactic devices that make language appropriate for representing higher levels of abstraction and a possibly most exact expression of the logical process of thinking. Going through a number of phenomena clustering around those two concepts, the author emphasises that Medgyesi had expressed the most important terms of Ramus' logic in Hungarian well before Apáczai, and was the first to construct the rhetoric of prayers and sermons, thus initiating the emergence of the Hungarian special terminology and rhetoric of the field and contributed to the development of Hungarian scholarly prose.

Keywords

EN

LANGUAGE HISTORY (HUNGARIAN); PRAGUE LINGUISTIC CIRCLE

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Society of Hungarian Linguistics
• Journal: Magyar Nyelv (Hungarian Language)
• Year: 2005
• Volume: 101
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 21-27
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Szathmari Istvan

• Istvan Szathmari, for postal; address contact the journal editor; www.c3.hu/~magyarnyelv/

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

09HUAAAA07094