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A PIONEER OF MODERN PEDAGOGY IN HUNGARY: SÁNDOR KARÁCSONY (1891—1952)
linguistic signs is not fully determined by the speakers intention: it also de¬
pends on the listeners interpretation." The speaker (“the one person”) has a
holistic, unitary “mental picture” and in speaking s/he breaks it down into
smaller parts, and the listener (“the other person”) reconstructs, from these
parts, a unitary mental picture. Communication, then, operates on the model
of holistic picture — breaking down into parts — reconstruction.
Some linguists claim that Karacsony’s linguistic ideas are very similar to
some of the ideas put forward by linguists such as Jakobson, and what Chomsky
proposed several decades later in his transformational grammar.’? We can also
find interesting parallels between Karacsony’s model of communication and
pragmatically-oriented models of communication developed some decades later.
From the structure of language Karacsony draws conclusions concerning
logic and philosophy. There is no scope in this paper to give a detailed account
of his findings. In a nutshell, he says that cognition and understanding is pos¬
sible not only along the classical Aristotelian lines of logic (proceeding from the
individual towards the general; using concepts obtained through abstraction
and defined through necessary and sufficient features for logical operations).
As the model of communication shows, linguistic signs become meaningful in
the text as a whole, through the interrelationships between the different parts
of the utterance, designed to make understanding by another person possible.
Parataxis is a typical feature of Hungarian grammar, and it also represents an
alternative approach to constructing logical theorems.”°
Other parallels with later linguistic theories include his ideas on the role
of language in thinking, the claim that the structure of language reflects and
determines ways of thinking.” This is similar to Benjamin Lee Whorf’s (1897¬
1941) linguistic relativity,? a controversial theory, although a weak version
of it is respectable even today. Karácsony also laid great stress on the view
that all dialects are egual — a cornerstone of present-day sociolinguistics.?? His
insistence on the role of language was parallelled by educational linguistics
which emerged in Britain in the 1960s, with debates on linguistic deficits and
the campaign for “languages across the curriculum’, etc." It was at this time
This aspect of communication has recently been highlighted by Relevance Theory through
its emphasis on the listener’s cognitive environment. Cf. SPERBER, Dan — WILSON, Deirdre,
Relevance: Communicatipon and Cognition, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986.
Stmoncsics, Paradigmavaltds, passim.
KARÁCSONY, Sándor, A magyar világnézet, Budapest, Írók Alapíványa, 2007, 2.
KARÁCSONY, A magyar észjárás, passim.
2 WHORE, Benjamin Lee, Language, Thought and Reality, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1956.
33 "KARÁCSONY, Sándor, Magyar ifjúság, Budapest, Széphalom, 2005, 141.
See, for example, HAWKINS, Eric W., Awareness of Language: An Introduction, Cambridge — New
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