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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH GRAMMATICAL CONTRASTS: THE NOUN PHRASE
5.4 MODIFICATION IN ENGLISH AND HUNGARIAN — PREVIEW
5.4.1. Study the noun phrases (NP) in the following text and discuss
which NP would require a change in word order if it was translated into
Hungarian and how they contrast with their Hungarian correspondents.
On June 30, 1908, at approximately 7:17 AM, an immense explosion occurred in the
region of Stony Tunguska, an area located approximately forty miles north-northwest
of Vanavara, Siberia. The explosion was sufficient to register as tremors of earth¬
quake-proportions on seismographs at Irkutsk, roughly 550 miles to the south.
Seismographs also registered in Moscow, the Tsarist Empire capital, St. Petersburg,
Germany (in the city of Jena over 3,000 miles away), in Java (Indochina), and Wash¬
ington D.C.
The Tunguska explosion exceeded in sheer energy the enormous size, long-term effects,
and destructive capability of the volcanic eruptions at Thera, a Greek island north
of Crete, and now known as Santorini (circa 1400 B.C.E.), Italy’s Vesuvius (August
24, C.E. 79) and the island of Krakatoa located between Sumatra and Java (August
26, 1883). The Tunguska blast easily dwarfed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic
bombs and all of the nuclear tests of the early 1950s.*°
5.5 LEFT-BRANCHING AND RIGHT-BRANCHING MODIFICATION
Modification in Hungarian is left-branching: most modifiers precede the noun
being modified. The only postmodifying structure in Hungarian is the relative
clause. In titles, postmodifying adverbial phrases may be acceptable: Elet a
Marson; Élet a fagypont alatt; Élet a halál után etc.
Modification in English is basically right-branching: except for adjectives,
most modification structures (prepositional phrases, participles, relative clauses)
are postmodifiers, as shown in Table 7.
Table 7. Modification in English and Hungarian
Hungarian English
tagas szoba spacious | room
haromlabu szék three- chair
legged
esernyös ferfi man with an
umbrella
nagyertekü | könyv book of great value
36 https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/esp_ciencia_tunguskal2.htm. Last accessed
14.12.2022.
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