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THE USE OF PASSIVE FORMS IN 'BÁNK BÁN' AND OTHER PIECES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY HUNGARIAN LITERATURE

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Beke J.

Magyar Nyelv (Hungarian Language)

2007

vol. 103

issue 3

311-328

The author presents empirical evidence proving that the text of József Katona's play entitled 'Bánk bán' contains passive verb forms and their derivatives in far higher numbers than other writings of the same author or those of other contemporary writers do. Several centuries earlier, such forms had been fairly frequent in Literary Hungarian, yet by the end of the nineteenth century they had almost completely been supplanted, thereby becoming an appropriate tool for giving an archaic flavour to the text they occurred in. It is especially noteworthy that Katona's lyrical poetry contains almost no passive forms at all, hence we are entitled to claim that, in his best-known play, he used those old forms on purpose as a device of archaicisation, thereby creating a unique style for that play, the plot of which takes place in the early thirteenth century. The characteristically archaic linguistic atmosphere of the play was considered unusual at the time, but later analysts all refer to it with appreciation. With respect to the proper use of passive word forms, the writer relied partly on historical sources and on writings of earlier authors, and partly on the legal parlance of his own time. In Katona's time, the first half of the nineteenth century, hardly any examples are known of authors using grammatical devices in order to characterise earlier periods: hence Katona was a pioneer of the use of that stylistic device. These passive constructions were neither found fault with nor changed, either by the playwright himself when he revised the text of the play, or by directors of its many performances, or indeed by Gyula Illyés, a twentieth-century poet who prepared a modernised version of the text, indicating that those constructions were always taken to be part and parcel of the diction of the play, in conformity with its archaising strain.

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1 Magyar Nyelv (Hungarian Language)

1 Beke J.

1 2007

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THE USE OF PASSIVE FORMS IN 'BÁNK BÁN' AND OTHER PIECES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY HUNGARIAN LITERATURE