Language and Literature paper by Molnár, Erzsébet
University of Miskolc

Samuel Brassai’s Linguistic Work

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Brassai’s most permanent achievement falls in the field of linguistics, which is the area in which he received the most acknowledgement. Modern syntactic literature begins with Brassai’s idea of the central position of the verb. His main work on syntax, in which he gives his detailed views about his theory of the sentence is A magyar mondat (The Hungarian Sentence). He placed the Hungarian sentence at the centre of his investigation, which was something of a novelty at that time, when, in the context of historical comparison and description, the unit of linguistic studies was the word. Brassai was the first to describe the actual structure of the communicative sentence; the first who had the idea that a sentence can be broken into a topic and a comment. He created the first and up to now the only sentence model that was capable of generating and describing endless numbers of Hungarian sentences. Researching the universal features of the sentence he concludes that the Hungarian sentence is not based on the dualism of the subject-predicate.
Brassai made intense studies of the problems of sentence and word order, examined the principles of stress and accent and carefully safeguarded the purity and correctness of the Hungarian language with regard to translations.



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