Deverbal noun-forming derivational suffixes exhibit polysemy in general and it is conspicuous that their major and minor functions (primary and secondary meanings) may be intermixed. The authoress surveys the suffixes having the major or minor meaning 'result of an action or process'. An overwhelming majority of suffixes having 'nomen acti' as their major meaning are no longer productive in present-day Hungarian and the derivatives involving them have a rather low frequency of occurrence. The only exceptions are -At, -mÁny, and -vÁny. Although they can hardly be claimed to be productive, either, existing derived nouns involving them still occur frequently. - The paper specifically discusses the semantics of -Ás, a suffix whose minor (secondary) function is to express 'result of an action or process', trying to find out how, in addition to its more general 'nomen actionis' major function, this suffix may have acquired this secondary meaning, as well as what phonological constraints may prevent the suffix -At (whose primary meaning is exactly 'result of an action or process') from occurring in these cases. - Synonymous suffixes expressing 'result of an action or process' do not in general form sets of nouns of identical meaning, partly because this would be superfluous, and partly due to 'lexical blocking'. However, the latter principle is not necessarily observed in all cases. Parallel derivations (that is, cases where several suffixes of more or less the same function can be attached to the same base) sometimes do occur even where there are no striking semantic differences between members of such sets of derivatives - that is, when the resulting forms are synonyms or near-synonyms. However, it can be observed that such parallel derivatives tend to undergo semantic differentiation over time.
Antonyms - just like synonyms and homonyms - may affect each other's meanings, even though opposition does not have as important a role in meaning specification as synonymy or homonymy does. In forming pairs of opposites, both concrete and abstract ones, an important role is played by derivational suffixes of opposite functions. Denominal privative adjectives in -tlAn denoting 'lacking something' tend to contrast semantically with adjectives carrying the suffix -(V)s meaning 'being supplied with something' and/or with constructions suffixed by -(j)U, closely related to the former. Available definitions of the uses of -(V)s and -(j)U suggest that the privative forms should only contrast semantically with derivatives involving -(V)s, in view of the fact that it is only a 'part-whole' relationship that makes it possible to detach the 'part' from the 'whole'. Indeed, a prerequisite of the use of a privative suffix is that the 'part' should be an alienable part or property of the possessive argument bearing the subject role. The aim of this paper is a presentation and semantic analysis of pairs of antonyms, as well as their classification into categories based on the various notions of opposites (exclusive opposition, converseness, difference in degree) in semiotics. The author gives a detailed account of pairs of words in -tlAn vs. -(V)s derived from the same stem and hence antonymous in terms of the original semantics of their suffixes, noting that such derivatives in some cases have deviated from their original meanings (e.g., csinos 'pretty' - csintalan 'naughty', kedves 'kind' - kedvetlen 'dispirited', szemes 'cute' - szemtelen 'impertinent'), and she devotes special attention to privative doublets (emerging due to semantic fission) and their opposites (e.g., alomtalan 'dreamless' / almatlan 'sleepless' - almos 'sleepy', gondtalan 'carefree' / gondatlan 'careless' - gondos 'careful').
From an information theoretical point of view, redundancy is the use of more signs for conveying some amount of information than would be absolutely necessary. Natural language codes are also characterised by extensive redundancy. In this paper, the authoress attempts to describe redundant grammatical phenomena at the syntactic level, from among the various structural representations containing linguistic information. In systematizing her collected data, she intends to find out how redundancy affects the reception of a text: whether 'superfluous signs' facilitate comprehension or, quite on the contrary, they pose difficulties for the decoding process. With respect to grammatically redundant phenomena, the authoress confronts 'official' statements by specialists of language care with actual empirical data. She elicited grammaticality judgements on 30 pairs of sentences in a questionnaire from 30 university students studying in Budapest, in order to get acquainted with their individual views on usage in connection with the phenomenon at hand.
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