Esti Kornél és a beégés. Megjegyzések a műfajiság pragmatikai vonatkozásaihoz

This paper, in which "text type" and "genre" are taken to be essentially synonymous, endorses the perspective of functional cognitive pragmatics with respect to genre. It does not only wish to point out that considerations and notions of functional cognitive pragmatics can be successfully made use of in the study of text typology. Reflecting on Bakhtin’s (1988) conception of speech genres, it also wants to emphasise that "genre" might be an essential notion for pragmatic research, too. The paper interprets genres (text types) in terms of construal aiming at adaptively satisfying communicative needs, and based on the mutual relationship of schema/type and instantiation, as discursive categories on the one hand, and as discursive schemas, on the other. The adequacy of the interpretation is argued for with the help of two case studies: one concerns the genre-related specifics of "Kornél Esti" by Kosztolányi, while the other discusses those of narratives taken from the internet topic called "The story of my embarrassment"

On the referential interpretation of computer-mediated narratives

The paper explores the referential interpretation of narratives through a case study of computer-mediated narrative discourse, a thread of Hungarian stories on an online discussion site. In particular, we are looking to find out what directs the addressee’s attention and how as she attempts to interpret such stories. Adopting the perspective of social cognitive linguistics, we interpret narrative discourses as joint attentional scenes whose interacting participants contribute to the intersubjective construal of referential scenes (including narrative ones) by directing and following each other’s attention. The main results of the investigation are as follows. 1) In the construal of the physical and social worlds of these stories, a key role is played by the deictic relation based on spatial and temporal contiguity which connects the world of the story to the world of the narrative discourse, interpreted as a joint attentional scene. 2) These narrative discourses frequently objectivize, in the form of metapragmatic reflections, both the situatedness of the referential centre (which lies with the storyteller), and the narrator’s subjective attitude to the narrated events

On Socio-Cultural Situatedness in Style Attribution: A Study of Style in Hungarian

Building upon the theoretical foundations of social cognitive linguistics, this paper makes the case for considering the speaker’s socio-cultural situatedness in the intersubjective context of joint attention as a key factor in the process of style attribution. Specifically, socio-cultural situatedness is regarded as a crucial component of the speaker’s perspective, playing a decisive role in the construal of style. In order to support this central assumption, the paper presents a two-phase empirical study of style in Hungarian. In the first phase, the authors conducted a questionnaire study to find out which everyday, intuitive labels of style give evidence of the speaker’s socio-cultural situatedness. The questionnaire made use of 12 excerpts of Hungarian university seminars to elicit reflections on style attributions. In the second phase, relying on the results of the first survey, a subsequent questionnaire was conducted. The aim of the second questionnaire was to operationalize folk categories of style attested in the first phase to describe style and measure stylistic markedness. Reconsidering earlier descriptive models, we found that the folk categories of style foreground different aspects of the speaker’s socio-cultural situatedness which – on a more abstract level – can be successfully described by the heuristic scientific categories of socio-cultural factors, which imply the speaker’s socio-cultural attitude to different aspects of style in the recipient’s interpretation. The speaker’s socio-cultural attitude comprises her attitude to the formation of discourse, to the discourse partner, to the value of the topic, to the temporality of constructions and to the norms of the register of the discourse

Nyelvtan, diskurzus, kontextus. A pragmatika társas kognitív megközelítése

A funkcionális kognitív nyelvészet alapfeltevése, hogy a nyelvi tevékenység során az emberek elméjében a nyelvi rendszer és a nyelvhasználat szorosan, elválaszthatatlanul összekapcsolódik egymással: a rendszer a használat, a használat pedig a rendszer által motivált. Így a nyelv leírásában a grammatikai és a pragmatikai szempontok sem válnak el élesen egymástól. A pragmatika a nyelvi konstrukciók rendszerszerű leírásához az alábbi lényeges pontokon járul hozzá. • A nyelv működésének leírásához olyan átfogó kiindulópontot kínál, amely termékeny diskurzusba hozható a specifikus kiindulópontú leírásokkal. • Részletező leírását adja annak a társas megismerő tevékenységnek, amelyben az emberek nyelvi szimbólumokat, konstrukciókat működtetnek. • A nyelvi szimbólumoknak, konstrukcióknak a jelentésképzésben betöltött szerepét diszkurzív, kontextuális megvalósulásuk felől mutatja be