Az Egri Ho Si Minh Tanárképző Főiskola Tud. Közleményei. 1982. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 16)

I. TANULMÁNYOK A TÁRSADALOMTUDOMÁNYOK KÖRÉBÖL - Kelemen Imre—Dr. Szabó István: Az esetgrammatika előzményei és néhány elméleti kérdése

THE FORERUNNERS OF CASE GRAMMAR AND SOME THEORETICAL PROMLEMS RELATED TO IT BY IMRE KELEMEN AND DR. ISTVÁN SZABÓ As the title of this paper suggests, the authors do not want to present here a new system of deep (semantic) cases (thus adding yet another scheme to the already complicated theory), let alone discover new cases (their number too is numerous and hard to survey; cf. I. Szabó's paper in this volume). We have set ourselves the mare modest task of collecting and reviewing bits of thoughts, statements and tenets scattered in various works published long before Fillmore, Chafe or Anderson brought out their — otherwise suggestive — case-grammatical doctrines. One qualification, however, is in order here before we proceed with our analysis. By forerunners we mean not only those linguists, their ideas and tenets who (which) preceded case-grammarians in time, but also those contemporary philologists whose approach to grammar is similar to or identical with Fillmore's or his followers'; these linguists —e. g., L. Elekfi, I. Molnár, J. Zsilka, to mention just a few Hungarians — have formulated a number of ideas consonant with case-grammatical dogmas, although these ideas have not yet developed into full-fledged theories, or have developed in a slightly different direction, as in the case of S. Károly or J. Zsilka. Let us commence to review case-grammatical thinking in a chronological order. Comenius (J. A. Komensky, 1592—1670, a linguist and educational reformer) broke off with the long-standing tradition of regarding a sentence as a ,,two-pivotal" (Subject — Predicate) construction (an approach also known as linguistic dualism), and viewed a sentence as a one-centred structural entity with the Verb in the centre and other constituents (including the Subject) being in its „field of gravitation", i, e., tied to it grammatically. When parsing a sentence, he had his students write the Verb in the centre and the other sentence parts around it, with lines connecting them with the centre. This approach is very similar to that of present-day case grammarians. S. Brassai (1800—1897) also took his stand in favour of verb-centrality approach. He couched his views in these pathetic — even a little poetic — words (op. cit., p.

11): „Yes, the Verb is the soul of the sentence. I have long been looking for other terms which might be more appropriate to denote the concept: centre, pole, corner, axis . .. but none of these is more proper ... The Verb governs all the other parts of the sentence, and they

... depend on it, are related to it." K. Bühler and L. Tesniére have also contributed to the case-grammatical thinking. (Cf. the references in the Bibliography.) The latter introduced the notion of ACTANT, a term widely used by present-day case-grammarians; to the former we owe a deeper understanding of what GOVERNMENT (as a grammatical concept) is. He explicated it in terms of Leerstelle (open slot) or valence: each Verb (or rather each Predicate, including the Adjective) has one (or several) „open slots" by virtue of its meaning, and the actants are inserted, as it were, into these „empty places". Government thus conceived has also become part of the conceptual set-up of Fillmorean grammar. Some of Bühler's .184