Az egyház mint egykori birtokos a magyar helynevekben

Abstract

Hungarian place names reflecting former ecclesiastical possession. Summary of a habilitation dissertation The dissertation discusses the linguistic and onomastic features of a culturally motivated name type, i.e. place names reflecting (former) ecclesiastical possession. With the advent and spread of Christianity in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, buildings and estates belonging to the Church were erected and named accordingly. Many such place names have been preserved to the present day and new ones could also emerge based on analogy. The first chapter of the thesis describes how the changes in the geographical landscape influenced the contemporary linguistic landscape and, eventually, the place naming patterns of the language. Chapter Two focuses on the historical background: how the church system and the institutions of the monastic orders were established in Medieval Hungary and sustained in later centuries. Chapter Three enumerates the sources from which the relevant place names were gathered and explains the setup of the database that served as a basis of the analysis. Chapter Four provides a comprehensive description of the collected name forms with respect to lexical, morphological, syntactic, motivational and denotative features, according to the classical periods in the history of the Hungarian language. Chapter Five discovers the trends in the development of the name forms concerning time, space and use. The dissertation adopts the viewpoint and ideas popularized in place name studies by functional cognitive linguistics.