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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH
Number 5 is the case where L2 contains structures or items that bear no
resemblance to or are completely absent from L1. Obviously, these cases cause
serious difficulties in learning L2. Most English phonemes are absent from
Hungarian (e.g., the dental fricatives or the glottal stop) or are partially different;
the system of English aspects and tenses is completely different, and there are
many lexical items that have no correspondents in Hungarian (see Chapter 5).
The term divergent phenomena (Number 6) refers to cases where one struc¬
ture or item in L1 corresponds to two (or more) structures or items in L2. This
causes the greatest difficulty, because the learner is obliged to make a choice
where there is no choice in their mother tongue. It is well known, for example,
that Hungarian-speaking students make mistakes in the use of the 3" person
pronoun he/she even at near native speaker proficiency, and find it more diffi¬
cult to identify pronoun references if the identification of the referent depends
solely on the pronoun he or she. From a practical point of view, polysemous
words also appear to fall into this category: if L2 uses two different words for
a single polysemous L1 word, trouble is bound to arise. In addition to consid¬
erable learning difficulty, divergence is a major source of error in using the
foreign language even at advanced level: an interesting phrase used by a Hun¬
garian chairperson at a conference in Hungary was "Keep your lecture.
1.3 THE DECLINE OF CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS
During the late 1960s and early 1970s it became apparent that contrastive
analysis did not correctly predict errors and learning difficulties: it predicted
errors and/or difficulties where students did not make mistakes, and in other
cases it did not predict errors and/or difficulty where they actually did (over¬
and underprediction). CA was also criticised because it was hooked on the
phonological and grammatical systems of the two languages, to the exclusion
of other levels, and it did not pay any attention to the use of language for com¬
municative purposes. Moreover, it was stuck at the sentence level, and (mis¬
takenly) it identified linguistic differences with learning difficulties.
The basic tenet of CL, that all errors are due to mother-tongue interference,
was challenged. Error analysis (Corder 1967) showed that errors may be due
to other factors: a significant portion of the errors previously considered to be
due to interference were shown to be instances of communicative strategies
deliberately used by the learners. The theory of creative construction, based
on Chomsky’s idea of universal grammar (Chomsky 1981), claimed that only
an insignificant percentage of errors can be attributed to the effect of the
mother tongue: the majority of errors are developmental errors that learners
overcome on their own, marking their progress. As the grammatical system
of every language is supposed to be based on universal grammar, students
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