Oldal 13 [13]
FOREWORD
this chapter can do is give a summary of the most important phonological and
prosodic contrasts, and revisit the lexical component of pronunciation, includ¬
ing the pronunciation of long words and commonly mispronounced words (e.g.
adjective, determine, examine, etc.).
Chapters 4 to 6 are concerned with grammatical contrasts. They are not
intended to provide a systematic comparison of all the grammatical structures
of English and Hungarian: this is neither possible nor necessary. There is a
practically infinite number of grammatical contrasts between English and
Hungarian, and it would be difficult to make a study of each, or to compare
the whole of the grammatical systems of English and Hungarian as such. That
would not be possible even if a comprehensive Hungarian—English contrastive
grammar existed. (It does not.). And it is not possible because CL is a single-se¬
mester course, and there is no point in devoting all the time to grammatical
contrasts at the expense of contrasts at other linguistic levels. There is simply
not enough time: one must be selective, and the contrasts that must be select¬
ed are those that have been found to cause difficulty and/or error in teaching
and translating practice.
A comprehensive, systematic grammatical comparison would also be un¬
necessary. Prospective users of this book will have studied English for over ten
years and are familiar with most of the grammatical patterns of English and
most of the differences between particular English and Hungarian grammat¬
ical structures. Some grammatical contrasts, however, are less well-known to
students, especially those that occur mainly in written language and transla¬
tion. In addition, some contrasts lead to fossilization, i.e. persistent errors,
even at proficiency level. Therefore, these chapters offer a selection of such
contrasts, made on the basis teaching experience. The terminology follows that
used in A Student’s Grammar of the English Language (Greenbaum and Quirk,
1991). Since the area where contrasts appear to influence learners most is
L1-L2 (Hungarian—English) translation, translation exercises are dominant
in these chapters.
It is important to note that this book is not a contrastive grammar: it takes
a look at Hungarian—English contrasts at several linguistic levels. Contrastive
grammars of different language pairs, some dating back to the first wave of CL
in the 1960s and some to more recent years, are usually confined to grammar
and phonology. They can be regarded as handbooks that contain information
on all (or most) grammatical and phonological contrasts, without assessing
their importance for the content or method of language learning and the degree
of difficulty and other factors that may influence learning.
In the second half of the 20" century it became clear that L1-L2 contrasts
exist at all linguistic levels, and lexical, phraseological, textual (discoursal)
and pragmatic contrasts are just as important as, or even more important than,
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