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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH
4.4 DELEXICAL VERBS
Intransitive verbs in English are often replaced by phrases containing a verb
with a rather general meaning (delexical verbs: have, make, do, give, etc.) and
a noun derived from the original verb:
Délután sétáltunk. — In the afternoon we took a walk.
Megreggeliztünk. — We had breakfast.
Hazudtál. — You have told me a lie.
1his tendency is strong in the Simple Present and Past Tenses and in written
language on specialist topics.
Felkidltott. — She exclaimed. / She gave an exclamation.
Elemeztük az adatokat. — We made an analysis of the data.
The use of this construction, referred to as structural compensation in Green¬
baum and Quirk (1990) is related to the issue of information flow. In English
sentences there is usually a gradual progression from low to high communica¬
tive dynamism (i.e., information value):
Jane walked leisurely.
low medium high information value
In this sentence Jane is given information (see Chapter 9), so its communica¬
tive value is low. The communicative value of the verb walked is higher, and
that of leisurely is the highest. Both walked and leisurely express new informa¬
tion, but the latter is the most important piece of new information.
This gradual increase in informativeness is broken in the case of intransitive
verbs that stand alone at the end of the sentence and are felt to be somehow
incomplete: Jane walked. Structural compensation restores the usual pattern:
Jane took a walk.
low medium high information value
The tendency to use verb+noun constructions instead of simple verbs occurs
in Hungarian, too, but ona smaller scale, particularly in spoken language, and
some phrases of this type are regarded as unacceptable (‘terpeszkedé sze¬
rkezetek’).
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