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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 referent, 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 frequency, 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 megrögzött comes from the fact that it collocates with words like hazudozö).°' The denotative meaning of the word pig, according to the Cambridge Dictionary 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 patronizing connotative meanings of tdt. The denotative meaning of English Slovak corresponds to both Hungarian words, but there is no word in English corresponding to the connotations of tdt. Contrasts of this type may cause difficulties 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 Hungarian 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 meaning inferred from the habitual lexical environment of a word in a corpus. + 107 +
