Communal or individual? Perspectivisation in Hungarian folksongs

Abstract

A widely recognized characteristics of Hungarian folksongs is the so-called natural image (known as 'sill'), whose interpretation has long been a semantic problem not fully unsolved in text linguistic and folklore studies. In this matter the notion of perspectivisation within the framework of cognitive linguistics may lead to novel observations. The ways a group of folksongs are construed allow for more than one interpretation of the same language element from different perspectives. This underlying feature manifests in the dynamic view of construal, namely, in the first part of the text, the speaker's vantage point is to be located implicit and off-stage, then later on it becomes explicit and on-stage; (Bühler 1934; Sanders−Spooren 1997). Meanwhile, what is viewed from a general communal perspective (based on folk conceptualization) in a more objective form at the beginning, is taken over by an overwhelming individual perspective and subjective construal in the next stage. In this process, numerous linguistic items are taken into account, such as scalar adjectives implying multiple reference points, definite noun phrases having the potential to be grounded in various contexts, or spatial and time adverbs with undefined reference points. This way, in a significant group of Hungarian folksongs, initial linguistic representation is possible to be cognized from more than one perspective, asserting communal (based on folk conceptualization) and individual perspectives simultaneously.