THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF PREDICATIVE PAST PARTICIPLES

• Authors: Zimanyi Arpad
• Languages of publication: HU

Abstracts

EN

The predicative use of past participles can be traced back to several, sometimes mutually independent, reasons. Earlier on, foreign patterns used to be followed via loan translations, but this source is less dominant today. Rather, syntactic synonymy that may be seen as necessary from a practical point of view comes into being whereby predicative past participles replace -va/-ve plus copula constructions, as well as finite verbs used with impersonal subjects or, less frequently, participles in -hato/-heto or passive verb forms. In the present case, the characteristics of structural synonymy identified by Karoly (1970: 138), identical sentence constituent function (predicate) but diverse part-of-speech affiliations (finite verbs, non-finite verb forms), are well attested. Genre- and dialect-specificity cannot be left out of consideration, either: official language use (because of impersonality) and descriptive genres of scientific discourse (due to the analogy of predicative adjectives) make good use of this construction. Some instances found in works of fiction, however, go back to other reasons. Semantic aspects of such examples, their stylistic effects, and the transitional character of their syntactic structure have been extensively discussed by Jozsef Tompa, therefore their repeated study was deemed unnecessary here. Compared to the other, synonymous constructions, predicative past participles may exhibit minor differences of meaning, actual or only assumed. Such differences are sufficient for some lexemes to occur in this role under certain circumstances, and to become accepted or customary through frequent occurrence, thereby facilitating the part-of-speech shift of the given form into an adjective proper.

Keywords

EN

PAST PARTICIPLE; PREDICATIVE USE; STRUCTURAL SYNONYMY

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Committee on Hungarian Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Magyar Nyelvor (Hungarian Language Guardian)
• Year: 2006
• Volume: 130
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 176-186
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Zimanyi Arpad

• No address given; contact the journal editor

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

11HUAAAA090312