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The Sentence in its Making
Having studied the foreshown minimal skeleton syntax of academic tradition let us turn our
attention - bearing in mind what we have learnt about sentence-construction - to a more practical
device: to the analytical (or deductive) and synthetic (inductive) syntax, that is to the process of
making the Sentence.
When translating a sentence to English or from English to Hungarian, we have the means of the
simple way of translating continuously: translating the parts of the sentence step by step forward
as it is in the source sentence. Nevertheless the different extensions may make the translation
difficult even in such a simple case.
Example:
Amikor Miss Emily Grierson elhunyt, az egész város elment a temetésére, a férfiak egy eltávozott
nagyság iránt érzett egyfajta tiszteletteljes érzésbl, az asszonyok többnyire a kíváncsiságtól
hajtva, hogy bepillantást nyerhessenek az elhunyt házába, ahová egy férfi szolga kivételével, az
öreg kertész és szakács egy személyben, legalább tíz év óta más azt nem tehette.
Try to translate the sentence and when having done the translation, compare it with the original
sentence.
If you prefer to scrutinize the analytical way of studying the elements of the sentence while
“making the sentence” and thus achieving the task, you may read the following explanatory
passage:
Here is a simple (not extended) sentence having merely a subject and a predicate in the English
version:
The town went.
The word ‘town’ stands for the people (population) of the town. Let us try to build up a more
extended sentence step by step. We ask questions and answer them.
What town went? The whole town went.
Whose whole town went? Our whole town went.
Where did our whole town go to? Our whole town went to a funeral.
To whose funeral did our whole town go? Our whole town went to her funeral.
When did our whole town go to her funeral?
When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral.
But who of the town went to her funeral, when Miss Emily Grierson died?
The men and the women:
But why did the men and the women go?
The men through a sort of respectful affection, the women mostly out of curiosity.
What was the men's affection for?
The men through a sort of affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity.
What were the women curious to see?
… the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of the house.
The inside of which house did the women want to see?
… which no one had seen - at last - ten years.
Had really no one seen the inside of that house in ten years?
… no one save an old man-servant,
What sort of man-servant was that, who saw the inside of the house?
… a combined gardener and cook,
Let us put together the answers obtained in this analytical and synthetic way!
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