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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, textual 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 contrasts, 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 information 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 assumed 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 oriented 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 phenomena, but as in the case of textual contrasts, although some studies on Hungarian—English pragmatic contrasts do exist (e.g. Furkó 2011), directly usable literature on differences in speech acts and politeness is missing. Therefore, s 12 e
