The event structure of personification in the poetry of Attila József

Abstract

It is probably beyond dispute that personification constitutes a specific type of verbalized events: its linguistic structure can be considered conventional, however, the details of its meaning and reference are often elaborated against our expectations. In this paper, I analyse the semantic structure of personifications occurring in the poetry of Attila József, in order to answer the following questions: (i) What are the characteristic patterns of verbal personification in the selected poems? (ii) Which schematic figure of the verb is elaborated typically by nominal arguments? (iii) Is there any difference between conventional and personifying use of the same verb?