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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH
2. COMPOUND WORDS
In Hungarian there are more compounds than in English. Hungarian learners tend
to use compounds where English uses simple words.
CONSIDER THESE EXAMPLES AND DISCUSS: WHY DO THESE ERRORS OCCUR?
Hungarian: compound English: simple word Interlanguage (Hunglish):
compound
íróasztal desk "writing table
kutatómunka research "research work
tűzhely stove, cooker *fireplace
PRAGMATIC DIFFERENCES
WHAT FORMULAS DO YOU USE IN PARTICULAR SITUATIONS? How DO YOU SAY IN
ENGLISH?
Ez többé nem fordul elő. Jó étvágyat! Elnézést, nem tudná megmondani, merre van
az állomás? Elnézést, nem hallottam mit mondott.
WHAT BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE DO YOU NEED TO INTERPRET CULTURE-BOUND
REFERENCES LIKE THIS:
But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
1.2 CLASSICAL CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS
In the first half of the 20" century structural linguistics became the dominant
paradigm in linguistics. Following Saussure (1916/1967), it focused its attention
on the system of language (langue) as against its use (parole). The system of
language was interpreted as a set of structural (grammatical and phonological)
patterns, and linguistics was supposed to identify these patterns without ref¬
erence to meaning.
Contrastive linguistics (also known as contrastive analysis, CA) developed
in the 50s and early 60s of the 20" century, based on structural linguistics. It
was intended to be applied linguistics: it was hoped that the results of (struc¬
tural) linguistics could be applied in the teaching of foreign languages, mak¬
ing it more efficient. It was assumed that knowledge of a language (linguistic
competence) was equivalent to knowing the structural patterns of that language,
so learning a foreign language meant learning the structural patterns of that
language. Therefore, the job of linguistics was to provide adequate descriptions
of the structural patterns of the two languages, and the job of contrastive
linguistics was to compare these descriptions, identifying the differences (the
contrasts), so that learners could focus on practising the patterns that were
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