The Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary

This study describes the sociolinguistic situation of the indigenous Hungarian national minorities in Slovakia (c. 600,000), Ukraine (c. 180,000), Romania (c. 2,000,000), Yugoslavia (c. 300,000), Slovenia (c. 8,000) and Austria (c. 6,000). Following the guidelines of Hans Goebl et al, the historical sociolinguistic portrait of each minority is presented from 1920 through to the mid-1990s. Each country's report includes sections on geography and demography, history, politics, economy, culture and religion, language policy and planning, and language use (domains of minority and/or majority language use, proficiency, attitudes, etc.). The team's findings were presented in the form of 374 pages of manuscripts, articles and tables, written in Hungarian and English. The core of the team's research results lies in the results of an empirical survey designed to study the social characteristics of Hungarian-minority bilingualism in the six project countries, and the linguistic similarities and differences between the six contact varieties of Hungarian and Hungarian in Hungary. The respondents were divided by age, education, and settlement group - city vs. village and local majority vs. local minority. The first thing to be observed is that Hungarian is tending to be spoken less to children than to parents and grandparents, a familiar pattern of language shift. In contact varieties of Hungarian, analytic constructions may be used where monolingual Hungarians would use a more synthetic form. Mr Kontra gives as an example the compound tagdij, which in Standard Hungarian means "membership fee" but which is replaced in contact Hungarian by the two-word phrase tagsagi dij. Another similar example concerns the synthetic verb hegedult "played the violin" and the analytic expression hegedun jatszott. The contrast is especially striking between the Hungarians in the northern Slavic countries, who use the synthetic form frequently, and those in the southern Slavic countries, who mainly use the analytic form. Mr. Kontra notes that from a structural point of view, there is no immediate explanation for this, since Slovak or Ukrainian are as likely to cause interference as is Serbian. He postulates instead that the difference may be attributable to some sociohistoric cause, and points out that the Turkish occupation of what is today Voivodina caused a discontinuity of the Hungarian presence in the region, with the result that Hungarians were resettled in the area only two and a half centuries ago. However, the Hungarians in today's Slovakia and Ukraine have lived together with Slavic peoples continuously for over a millennium. It may be, he suggests, that 250 years of interethnic coexistence is less than is needed for such a contact-induced change to run its course. Next Mr. Kontra moved on to what he terms "mental maps and morphology". In Hungarian, the names of cities and villages take the surface case (eg. Budapest-en "in Budapest") whereas some names denoting Hungarian settlements and all names of foreign cities take the interior case (eg. Tihany-ban "in Tihany" and Boston-ban "in Boston). The role of the semantic feature "foreign" in suffix-choice can be illustrated by such minimal pairs as Velence-n "in Velence, a village in Hungary" versus Velence-ben "in Velence [=Venice], a city in Italy", and Pecs-en "in Pecs, a city in Hungary" vs. Becs-ben "in Becs, ie. Vienna". This Hungarian vs. foreign distinction is often interpreted as "belonging to historical (pre-1920) Hungary" vs. "outside historical Hungary". The distinction is also expressed in the dichotomy "home" vs. "abroad'. The 1920 border changes have had an impact on both majority and minority Hungarians' mental maps, the maps which govern the choice of surface vs. interior cases with placenames. As there is a growing divergence between the mental maps of majority and minority Hungarians, so there will be a growing divergence in their use of the placename suffixes. Two placenames were chosen to scratch the surface of this complex problem: Craiova (a city in Oltenia, Romania) and Kosovo (Hungarian Koszovo) an autonomous region in southeast Yugoslavia. The assumption to be tested was that both placenames would be used with the inessive (interior) suffixes categorically by Hungarians in Hungary, but that the superessive suffix (showing "home") would be used near-categorically by Hungarians in Romania and Yugoslavia (Voivodina). Minority Hungarians in countries other than Romania and Yugoslavia would show no difference from majority Hungarians in Hungary. In fact, the data show that, contrary to expectation, there is considerable variation within Hungary. And although Koszovo is used, as expected, with the "home" suffix by 61% of the informants in Yugoslavia, the same suffix is used by an even higher percentage of the subjects in Slovenia. Mr. Kontra's team suggests that one factor playing a role in this might be the continuance of the former Yugoslav mentality in the Hungarians of Slovenia, at least from the geographical point of view. The contact varieties of Hungarian show important grammatical differences from Hungarian in Hungary. One of these concerns the variable use of Null subjects (the inclusion or exclusion of the subject of the verb). When informants were asked to insert either megkertem or megkertem ot - "I asked her" - into a test sentence, 54.9% of the respondents in the Ukraine inserted the second phrase as opposed to only 27.4% in Hungary. Although Mr. Kontra and his team concentrated more on the differences between Contact Hungarian and Standard Hungarian, they also discovered a number of similarities. One such similarity is demonstrable in the distribution of what Mr. Kontra calls an ongoing syntactic merger in Hungarian in Hungary. This change means effectively that two possibilities merge to form a third. For instance, the two sentences Valoszinuleg kulfoldre fognak koltozni and Valoszinu, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni merge to form the new construction Valszinuleg, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni ("Probably they will move abroad."). When asked to choose "the most natural" of the sentences, one in four chose the new construction, and a chi-square test shows homogeneity in the sample. In other words, this syntactic change is spreading across the entire Hungarian-speaking region in the Carpathian Basin Mr. Kontra believes that politicians, educators, and other interested parties now have reliable and up-to-date information about each Hungarian minority. An awareness of Hungarian as a pluricentric language is being developed which elevates the status of contact varieties of Hungarian used by the minorities, an essential process, he believes, if minority languages are to be maintained.

A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology

Grigorij Kreidlin (Russia). A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology. Mr. Kreidlin teaches in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the State University of Humanities in Moscow and worked on this project from August 1996 to July 1998. The classical approach to non-verbal and verbal oral communication is based on a traditional separation of body and mind. Linguists studied words and phrasemes, the products of mind activities, while gestures, facial expressions, postures and other forms of body language were left to anthropologists, psychologists, physiologists, and indeed to anyone but linguists. Only recently have linguists begun to turn their attention to gestures and semiotic and cognitive paradigms are now appearing that raise the question of designing an integral model for the unified description of non-verbal and verbal communicative behaviour. This project attempted to elaborate lexical and semantic fragments of such a model, producing a co-ordinated semantic description of the main Russian gestures (including gestures proper, postures and facial expressions) and their natural language analogues. The concept of emblematic gestures and gestural phrasemes and of their semantic links permitted an appropriate description of the transformation of a body as a purely physical substance into a body as a carrier of essential attributes of Russian culture - the semiotic process called the culturalisation of the human body. Here the human body embodies a system of cultural values and displays them in a text within the area of phraseology and some other important language domains. The goal of this research was to develop a theory that would account for the fundamental peculiarities of the process. The model proposed is based on the unified lexicographic representation of verbal and non-verbal units in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures, which the Mr. Kreidlin had earlier complied in collaboration with a group of his students. The Dictionary was originally oriented only towards reflecting how the lexical competence of Russian body language is represented in the Russian mind. Now a special type of phraseological zone has been designed to reflect explicitly semantic relationships between the gestures in the entries and phrasemes and to provide the necessary information for a detailed description of these. All the definitions, rules of usage and the established correlations are written in a semantic meta-language. Several classes of Russian gestural phrasemes were identified, including those phrasemes and idioms with semantic definitions close to those of the corresponding gestures, those phraseological units that have lost touch with the related gestures (although etymologically they are derived from gestures that have gone out of use), and phrasemes and idioms which have semantic traces or reflexes inherited from the meaning of the related gestures. The basic assumptions and practical considerations underlying the work were as follows. (1) To compare meanings one has to be able to state them. To state the meaning of a gesture or a phraseological expression, one needs a formal semantic meta-language of propositional character that represents the cognitive and mental aspects of the codes. (2) The semantic contrastive analysis of any semiotic codes used in person-to-person communication also requires a single semantic meta-language, i.e. a formal semantic language of description,. This language must be as linguistically and culturally independent as possible and yet must be open to interpretation through any culture and code. Another possible method of conducting comparative verbal-non-verbal semantic research is to work with different semantic meta-languages and semantic nets and to learn how to combine them, translate from one to another, etc. in order to reach a common basis for the subsequent comparison of units. (3) The practical work in defining phraseological units and organising the phraseological zone in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures unexpectedly showed that semantic links between gestures and gestural phrasemes are reflected not only in common semantic elements and syntactic structure of semantic propositions, but also in general and partial cognitive operations that are made over semantic definitions. (4) In comparative semantic analysis one should take into account different values and roles of inner form and image components in the semantic representation of non-verbal and verbal units. (5) For the most part, gestural phrasemes are direct semantic derivatives of gestures. The cognitive and formal techniques can be regarded as typological features for the future functional-semantic classification of gestural phrasemes: two phrasemes whose meaning can be obtained by the same cognitive or purely syntactic operations (or types of operations) over the meanings of the corresponding gestures, belong by definition to one and the same class. The nature of many cognitive operations has not been studied well so far, but the first steps towards its comprehension and description have been taken. The research identified 25 logically possible classes of relationships between a gesture and a gestural phraseme. The calculation is based on theoretically possible formal (set-theory) correlations between signifiers and signified of the non-verbal and verbal units. However, in order to examine which of them are realised in practice a complete semantic and lexicographic description of all (not only central) everyday emblems and gestural phrasemes is required and this unfortunately does not yet exist. Mr. Kreidlin suggests that the results of the comparative analysis of verbal and non-verbal units could also be used in other research areas such as the lexicography of emotions.