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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LEXICAL CONTRASTS 7.5.3 Meronymy Meronymy is the part-whole relationship: morning, afternoon and night are parts of the day, and foes are part of the foot, which is part of the Jeg, with the latter being part of the body. Cross-linguistic differences appear in meronymic relations, too. Thus, in Hungarian reggel and délelétt are distinguished as parts of the day, while English morning comprises both. It should be noted that this is a case of convergence (two L1 items corresponding to just one in L2), which was classed as ‘easy’ by classical contrastive linguistics. In spite of this, it often confuses Hungarians, who tend to insist on distinguishing between reggel and délelőtt in English. 7.5.4 Polysemy Polysemy is not related to links between different words: it is a relationship between the meanings of the same word. Polysemy is pervasive in language, with the exception of scientific terms. Polysemy usually works out as one-to-two or one-to-many correspondence, i.e., divergence. Therefore, it tends to be No. 1 problem in vocabulary acguisition and use by foreign learners. Zenét hallgattunk. — We listened to music. Mindketten hallgattunk. — We were silent. ("Both of us listened.) Meanings close to the central meaning of a word tend to be highly transferable because it is an unmarked feature. We do not often notice polysemy in our native language, since polysemous words are usually disambiguated by context. Deceptive transferability often leads to interference errors. A large proportion of lexical errors is due to polysemy, both in oral communication and writing, as well as in translation. Ihe following example is a bilingual notice in a botanical garden: A növényágy felújítás alatt van. Kérjük ne lépjen be. The plant bed is under renovation. Please do not *log in. Polysemy is closely linked with collocations: in different collocations a word will have different meanings, as shown by the examples below. Consequently, one way to eliminate interference is to learn collocations instead of words. nedves ut — wet road nedves talaj — (on surface) wet soil; (containing moisture/water) moist soil nedves levegő — humid air ajándékot kap — get a present * 113 ¢
