Tendencies in the development of Late Old Hungarian and Early Middle Hungarian main clauses of reported speech

Abstract

In this paper I investigate the reporting main clauses of direct andindirect speech of Hungarian in two periods. I present the linguistic formsand grammatical rules (rule-like tendencies) that took part in implementingthe content of a quotation, I survey the necessary and the possible elementsforming the structures, and also, the consequences that can be drawn fromthe changes occurring in the two periods. With regard to direct speech, Itouch upon issues related to genre, text formation, and reception. Insteadof a comprehensive description, I rather concentrate on phenomena that havenot been analysed as yet or have been dealt with only sporadically. Theseare: the presence or lack of a reporting main clause, its language (Latinor Hungarian), its position and word order; the marking of quotes in writing;in connection with the head of the subordinate clause, I touch upon issuessuch as the dominance of mond 'say', double heads, thestrengthening of transitivity, and the úgy mond'so says' structure; furthermore, I tackle the frequency, the typical forms,vowel quality and position of phoric pronouns. The paper concludes with asummary which is supplemented by a brief survey of the direct and indirectspeech forms of contemporary Hungarian.