Oldal 112 [112]
OCR
HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH These examples provide evidence for the claim that several factors may influence learning difficulty and error: in these cases, L1-L2 contrasts and order of learning lead to the development of a primary counterpart. Since lehetöseg in Hungarian may have two meanings, corresponding to two different words in English, and the same goes for megtudni, what we have to do with here is divergence, the most difficult type of contrast, with learning difficulty enhanced by the order of learning. Learners also tend to prefer literal correspondents. Ihe Hungarian construction Lehet, hogy ... literally corresponds to English It is possible that ..., or It can happen that ... — phrases that Hungarian learners tend to use exclusively, neglecting the use of the auxiliaries may/might. In a similar way, the phasal verb find out resembles Hungarian megtudni in that it consists of two morphemes, and it tends to become the primary counterpart for the latter, used by Hungarian learners to the exclusion of simple find and learn. Often synonyms exist in both languages, but their meanings or areas of use do not fully coincide, and there are criss-cross correspondences between their meanings. Hungarian metré is used for all underground lines, while foldalatti refers to the Millenium Underground in Budapest, yet the two words are often used interchangeably. In Britain the word underground (e.g., The London Underground) is often replaced by the word tube (see above) while in the US the word subway is used. Sometimes the exact difference in the meanings of synonyms is difficult to pin down. Componential analysis may sometimes help to discover meaning differences (see Rudzka et al 1981, 1985). 7.5.2 Hyponymy The lexical system of a language consists of many small or large hierarchically organised structures: there is a superordinate word and various subordinate words, called hyponyms. These structures practically segment reality in ways specific to a given language. The hierarchies usually have three or four levels, but scientific classifications may be much more elaborate. Hyponomy is the kind-of relation: a mouse is a kind of rodent, a rodent is a kind of animal; a pine is a kind of tree, a tree is a kind of plant. Words on the same level sharing the same superordinate term are called co-hyponyms. The words beef, pork, mutton, venison, duck etc. are co-hyponyms of the superordinate word meat. There are many different interlingual differences in such hierarchical structures. The number of words at different levels of the hierarchy may be different in different languages. Some differences in hyponymic relations between English and Hungarian will be shown below. * 110 +
