Private verbs as indicators of speech-related language use in Middle Hungarian registers

Abstract

Speech-related texts play a prominent role in historical linguistic studies, and comparing sources that differ in terms of register characteristics (formal/informal, spoken/written) can help to provide a more accurate picture of where various gram-matical and pragmatic innovations originate and how they spread. The aim of our case study is to characterize sources belonging to different text types on the basis of textual features. The sources for the analysis are the data from the Old and Middle Hungarian Corpus of Informal Language Use and the Middle Hungarian Corpus of Memoirs and Drama. According to studies on English, one of the most important indicators of involved registers is the category of private verbs, which describe mental states, actions, and emotional attitudes, as opposed to public verbs, that is, verbs expressing communi-cation. The relevance of this factor in Hungarian requires investigation, particularly with regard to the extent to which occurrences are actually related to the current speaker/ writer or hearer/adressee. We examined structures involving more than twenty private verbs (including vél 'assume', gondol 'think', tart 'think', hisz 'believe', fél 'afraid', tetszik 'like', szeret 'love', sajnál 'feel sorry', csodál 'wonder'). Our results highlight the problems associated with mechanical categorization, as well as the era- and register-specific characteristics of the group of verbs under study.