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FOREWORD this chapter can do is give a summary of the most important phonological and prosodic contrasts, and revisit the lexical component of pronunciation, including 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-semester 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 selected 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 unnecessary. 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 grammatical structures. Some grammatical contrasts, however, are less well-known to students, especially those that occur mainly in written language and translation. 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, + 11 e
