ONCE MORE ON KAZINCZYS VIEWS ON STYLISTICS (Kazinczy stilisztikai nezeteirol - meg egyszer)

The author has two reasons for returning to the study of Kazinczy's views on style. First, both linguistics and stylistics have progressed substantially during the past two or three decades. On the other hand, in the course of editing his recently published 'Encyclopaedia of Figures', he had the occasion to examine Adelung's and Revai's stylistic views in detail. In this paper, he first enumerates a number of reasons why Kazinczy's attention was drawn to stylistics in the first place. He then emphasises that Kazinczy thought the most important issues were general stylistic requirements, as well as stylistic phenomena permeating the whole of a literary piece, also known as text-stylistic phenomena. He thought the fundamental requirement of style was what he called adequacy: the accurate expression of thoughts and feelings. His most important criteria of assessing a literary piece were taste and the example set by the best writers. He was aware that linguistic and stylistic polyphony (Vieltonigkeit) was a prerequisite of adequacy. He also saw the importance of stylistic registers, nuances, and periods, as well as the stylistic value of phenomena pertaining to individual levels of language.