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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 structure 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 difficult 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 considerable learning difficulty, divergence is a major source of error in using the foreign language even at advanced level: an interesting phrase used by a Hungarian 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 (overand 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 communicative purposes. Moreover, it was stuck at the sentence level, and (mistakenly) 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 22 ¢
