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FOREWORD
grammatical and phonological contrasts. Therefore, a university course should
extend to contrastive lexicology, contrastive text linguistics and contrastive
pragmatics, too. All the more so because conscious knowledge of lexical, tex¬
tual and pragmatic contrasts is apparently more important and can help
learners more than conscious knowledge of phonology and grammar, which
may rely more on implicit learning than explicit explanation. For this reason,
the current book includes, in addition to phonological and grammatical con¬
trasts, a survey of Hungarian—English contrasts at the levels of vocabulary,
phraseology, discourse and pragmatics, and also examines the role of contrasts
in translation.
Chapter 7 is devoted to lexical, and Chapter 8 to phraseological contrasts.
Much of the material included here is based on the author’s previous research
and experience in teaching courses in vocabulary, which explains the large
number of practical exercises. These chapters provide some theoretical infor¬
mation on lexical semantics and multi-word units, too, but not more than is
necessary for explanation, following the traditions of applied linguistics books,
such as McCarthy’s (1990).
Chapter 9 is concerned with textual contrasts. There are several well-known
models of discourse production and comprehension (e.g. Kintsch and van Dijk
1978, Petöfi 2004, etc.). However, these are not contrastive studies of English
and Hungarian discourse phenomena, and given the practical orientation of
this coursebook, a detailed presentation of such general text linguistic models
falls outside its scope. It must be selective and must confine its treatment of
discourse to the most important basic concepts and such Hungarian-English
contrasts in spoken and written discourse as have been found or may be as¬
sumed to play a part in foreign language teaching and learning. At the level of
applied linguistics, Discourse by Cook (1989) provides a useful summary of
the most important concepts of discourse analysis. More theoretically orient¬
ed information on non-contrastive aspects of text linguistics is considered
irrelevant for the purposes of this coursebook.
Unfortunately, the literature on Hungarian—English discourse contrasts is
limited: as a matter of fact, the present author was unable to find contrastive
studies in this area, so much of the discussions on the possible difficulty of
various text-building contrasts had to be based on the author’s teaching and
translating experience, and ultimately guesswork. Students are welcome to
describe their own experience and carry out research.
Chapter 10 is devoted to contrastive pragmatics. There is an abundance of
contrastive pragmatics studies on various speech acts and politeness phenom¬
ena, but as in the case of textual contrasts, although some studies on Hungar¬
ian—English pragmatic contrasts do exist (e.g. Furkó 2011), directly usable
literature on differences in speech acts and politeness is missing. Therefore,
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