Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 109. kötet (2013)
Tanulmányok - Rácz, Anita: Ethnic groups and settlement names in Hungary 255
262 RÁcz, Anita century, and that they functioned next to each other in parallel for less than half a century (cf. Kniezsa 1943: 128, Bárczi 1958: 160, Szabó 1966: 136). The issue of the chronology of early Hungarian place-name types was subjected to detailed scrutiny by these authorities, and their findings have been complemented and clarified by Gyula Kristó who, however, comes to quite different conclusions. According to him, there was no sudden change of type and the period of parallel use started earlier and ended later than Kniezsa and his followers claim: spanning from the 11th to the middle or end of the 14th century. In support of his claim he points out that the type of compound settlement name reached its peak of popularity in the 15th century when the type of place names without formant was much less lively (Kristó 1976: 92). My research results are more in line with the findings of Kristó than of any others. The appearance of this name type as a lexical group can be located in the second half of the 12th century, even though the highest proportion occurred from the first half of 14th century up to and including the first half of the 15Ih century. During the second half of the 15th the century the number of instances of this name type falls to less than half of the tokens found for the preceding half century. The traditional typology did not consider the question as to how and according to what structure common geographical names were connected to ethnonyms. I have been able to conclude on the basis of my investigations that in the case of geographical common nouns linked to ethnonyms the tendency is for the morphology of the generic suffixes to be grammatically unmarked. Although some such place name formants do use personal suffixes implying the possessive, a much higher proportion of the names inspected employ the term in its base form, this phenomenon being clearly visible in the endings -falu, -telek and -vár. However, for some other formants such as -földe, -háza, -laka, the opposite tendency is true. Some common geographical names, while being of only scant overall incidence, exclusively appear in their base forms, these being -egyház, -sok, -szállás, -ülés, -város, -vég and the special case of -falud. One the other hand, the toponymic terms -lakosa, -monostora and -váralja are only found in possessive structures. It is noteworthy that if we look into the chronology of the name formations that appear in documents, we can see that many of the forms bearing a personal marker are due to a change of type: they were established by the addition of a personal suffix to ethnonym-based settlement names without name formants. This means that the earlier or earliest name was an unmarked structure, and the subsequent addition of a possessive marker created the grammatically marked forms. 5. In addition to taking into account the three traditional name types presented according to established morphological criteria, in my monograph I also distinguish two types of name group. One of them is in some ways related to the category described above, since the ethnonym occupies the initial position as a pre
