The attribution of some specific quality is most often expressed by adjectives; but the same semantic content may also be expressed by various constructions like coordinate or subordinate phrases and various types of phraseological units. In this paper, the authoress discusses the way this semantic category is represented in 15- and 18-year-old secondary school students' spontaneous speech: what nominal and verbal phrases, set phrases, and idioms are used, how often and in what functions. The analysis is based on 'guided spontaneous speech'; in the resulting five-minute samples, constructions that related to the speaker's opinion on movies were analysed both in qualitative and quantitative terms. The results yielded further data on the mental lexicon, as well as on age-specific features of teenagers' spontaneous speech.
Previous studies on speech tempo in Hungarian have revealed that it is getting faster in general and that it is an age group related variable, too. In this paper, the authoress studied the speech rate and articulation rate of secondary school pupils, a group of speakers generally assumed to speak fast. She tried to find out what relationship obtains between the tempo and quality of their speech and how all that relates to comprehensibility. Articulation rate and speech rate values, as well as the types, number, and length of utterance-internal (silent and filled) pauses were established for two age groups (15 and 18-yearolds). She collected and classified the phenomena characterising their articulation, looked at their frequency of occurrence, and analysed the pronunciation variants arising due to fast tempo. The results confirmed the effect of age on tempo in this narrower age range, too. The faster speech of older pupils co-occurred with significant shortening of their silent pauses. Increasing speech tempo resulted in sound omissions, syllable omissions and various sound replacements, as well as in massive shortening of vowel durations. Articulatory inaccuracies due to fast tempo and the resulting variant pronunciations primarily occurred in content words, therefore they can lead to difficulties in comprehension and to communication deficits.
The study examines the combined effect of tax rates (with special attention to tax rates on work) and level of corruption on the GDP-proportionate tax receipts of 27 OECD countries, based on annual data for 2000-2004. A graphic representation of the combined interaction of the tax wedge and the level of corruption produces a Laffer-type curve. The article shows that this relation is the resultant of several distinguishable effects: one is the direct effect in a positive direction of the tax rates, another the effect in a negative direction of the level of corruption, and a third the effect in a negative direction on tax receipts of the interaction between tax rates and high corruption. The last expresses that the marginal effect of the tax wedge depends on the level of corruption. The relations derived are valid in the long term. The article also includes calculations of the possible shortfall of tax receipts in the examined countries that can be attributed to corruption and to the combined effect of high corruption and tax rate. The relative values of the resulting tax-receipt shortfalls can also provide information for a league-table of countries according to the size of their black economy. In terms of these indicators, Hungary is among the leading OECD countries.
The speech of the coming generations can be criticized on a number of counts. Their difficulties of self-expression, their troubles with written communication, their articulation problems, the acceleration of their speech tempo are sadly experienced by teachers, and can be observed in everyday communicative situations. In this paper, we investigate the usage of words in, and stylistic characteristics of, teenagers' spontaneous conversation. We also try to find out what word formation processes they use preferentially, as well as how the language created by internet communication emerges in their oral and written utterances and what possible consequences all that may have.
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