ON COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF PARTS OF SPEECH IN HUNGARIAN AND RUSSIAN

Abstract

The issue of parts of speech in different languages remained contentious through many centuries. And it is still an unsolved problem in modern linguistics because of the weak theoretical framework which has to do with the very nature of parts of speech and lexicographical factor (for example, the choice of the dictionaries which were the basis for words selection). This factor influences parts of speech categorization, its composition and its volume. Distinguishing different parts of speech principles, their nomenclature, hierarchy is a very important question of any language’s grammar, which forms the basis of the language’s grammatical structure and it is still not resolved in modern hungarology. The present article shows the results of comparative studies of parts of speech in Hungarian and Russian. This approach reveals not only specific features of grammatical structures of these languages to show morphological distinctions of two languages of different structure but also to discover the common features, criteria and unified approach to clustering parts of speech and to grammatical categories’ description. The author’s goal was to trace the development of the linguists’ view on the part of speech, to distinguish different approaches to study them, to describe and interpret word classes in both languages by consistent comparison of linguistic facts. Meanwhile, the emphasis was on identifying inconsistencies, contrasting features and grammatical discrepancy. Special attention was paid to the review of parts of speech theory and their classification in Hungarian linguistics. The results of comparative analysis of parts of speech in Hungarian and Russian are presented in the article. Through the contentious comparing of grammatical facts of Hungarian and Russian the author established how systems of parts of speech in Russian and Hungarian can be related, what common features and differences they have. The joint use of methods of comparative linguistics is demonstrated in the article. Data of the modern explanatory dictionaries of the Hungarian language was used for analysis of the chosen lexicon. The analysis of the language facts made by tools of contrastive linguistics along with the results of comparing data of these languages let one learn Hungarian grammar easier and deeper and also let one develop the theory and practice of translation, lexicography and interculturalism.