文法カテゴリーとしての格(ケース) : ハンガリー語の場合(ケース)からの展望

概要

論文の詳細を見る
The Hungarian language is said to have more than thirty cases. This seems to either impress or shock those who have knowledge of Latin, German or Russian. However, if we investigate the Hungarian case system comparing with Latin, it becomes clear that the term case is used in different meaning. The grammatical category of case was originally a morphological category of noun declensions and a pure formal category in Latin and Greek, but in modern linguistics the term case often refers to a semantic or functional category. In Hungarian it is used in both formal and functional senses and it refers to inflectional suffixes which have syntactic functions in a sentence. The scholars often disagree about the exact number of case suffixes in Hungarian. This is because the distinction between case (inflectional) suffixes and derivational suffixes in Hungarian is not clear. Instead of traditional binary categorization, if we apply the prototype theory which permits degree of membership in linguistic categorization, we could say that it is not relevant to define the exact number of case suffixes in Hungarian.