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Chapter 7 HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LEXICAL CONTRASTS ——o— As described in Chapter 2, modern trends in second language acquisition research follow a multifactor approach, claiming that errors and learning difficulty are due to several interacting factors. These factors include some nonlinguistic ones (e.g., learner variability, level of proficiency, order and method oflearning and teaching) and some linguistic ones, such as universal principles of acquisition, inherent difficulty and L1 influence due to L1/L2 contrasts. In the case of vocabulary acquisition inherent difficulties may be traced back to such features as cognitive complexity of the concept denoted by a lexical item, part of speech, regularity of suffixes and inflections, morphological transparency, concreteness, pronounceability, word length, register and idiomaticity/transparency. The influence of L1 may affect various aspects of word knowledge and may be manifested in positive and negative transfer, avoidance, willingness to use or avoid L1-based strategies, ease or difficulty of learning and recall under stressful conditions. This chapter will focus on lexical contrasts between L1 Hungarian and L2 English and the influence of these contrasts on the acquisition of various aspects of lexical knowledge by Hungarian learners of English. Before identifying the contrasts, however, it is necessary to look at the units that can be compared and the bases of the comparisons. 7.1 WORDS The units stored in and retrieved from the mental lexicon (ML) include single and compound words, idioms and other multiword units. Words and idioms (including phrasal verbs) are often referred to as lexical units or lexical items, defined as “a word or several words that have a meaning that is not expressed by any of its separate parts". In this chapter we shall use the term word to refer to single and compound words, lexical item to refer to words, idioms and phrasal verbs, and multiword unit to refer to idioms, phrasal verbs, collocations, sayings, proverbs and so on. Multiword units may also be referred to as phraseological units. As seen from the above, idioms and phrasal verbs are 44 https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/lexical-unit. Last accessed 02.12.2020. + 100 +
