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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LEXICAL CONTRASTS
From the vocabulary learning point of view, the difficulty of acquiring an
item that has no equivalent in L2 may be variable: if the item has a clear ref¬
erent, it may not be very difficult. If an item in L1 has no equivalents in L2,
learners must find a strategy to express or explain it.
7.4.2 Connotative meaning
Connotative meaning is connected with the emotions and associations that a
word evokes. It also includes sound-based associations like onomatopoeia
(cock-a-doodle-do), meanings derived from motivation (dragonfly, butterfly,
windfall tax, greenback), etimology (bugger, de-bugging), knowledge of fre¬
quency, stylistic value (formal vs. informal, loanword vs. indigenous word,
neologism, archaism, slang etc.), register, language variety (standard or dialect
etc.), meanings acquired from collocations (e.g., part of the meaning of meg¬
rögzött comes from the fact that it collocates with words like hazudozö).°'
The denotative meaning of the word pig, according to the Cambridge Dic¬
tionary of English, is “a large pink, brown or black farm animal with short legs
and a curved tail, kept for its meat”. Its connotative (associative) meanings are
related to the common view that pigs are filthy, eat greedily, etc.
Synonyms in a language may have the same denotative meaning, but may
differ in their connotations. A case in point is Hungarian tót and szlovák. Both
have the same denotative meaning, but the latter does not have the patroniz¬
ing connotative meanings of tdt. The denotative meaning of English Slovak
corresponds to both Hungarian words, but there is no word in English corre¬
sponding to the connotations of tdt. Contrasts of this type may cause difficul¬
ties in literary translation.
Equivalence of connotative meaning may be possible in some cases (lions
and tigers probably have the same connotations in most languages), yet in
general connotative equivalence is rather limited. A word may have a very good
denotative equivalent in another language, yet its connotative meanings may
be different. Russian pa6una has a good (working) denotative equivalent in
Hungarian berkenyefa, but the Russian word has associative meanings derived
from the folk songs in which it frequently occurs, while berkenyefa does not
carry the same connotations (akdcfa, jegenyefa and fiizfa occur in Hungarian
folk songs). The denotative meaning of English foreign is equivalent to Hun¬
garian kilfoldi, but its connotations are different.
web.archive.org/web/20200306084405/ http://www.londonkalauz.hu/trooping-the-colour.
Last accessed 14.12.2022.
5! In corpus linguistics this is called semantic prosody, i.e., the attitudinal and evaluative mean¬
ing inferred from the habitual lexical environment of a word in a corpus.
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