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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 earthquake-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 Washington 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. + 79 +
