Oldal 156 [156]
OCR
HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH We do not often notice semantic ellipsis, because semantically elliptical items and sentences usually have a conventional interpretation based on cultural knowledge. Thus, e.g., in the case of a man with a wooden leg, our experience tells us that it refers to ‘a man walking on a prosthetic leg’ rather than ‘aman carrying a prosthetic leg’. Prepositional phrase postmodifiers in English are usually elliptical in this way, and their Hungarian correspondents often contain the ellipted element see Chapter 5.8): his speech at the meeting on January 15th - a januar 15-i ülesen tartott/ mondott beszede In a similar way, in the case of object-deleting verbs the missing object is recoverable from cultural knowledge, without reference to the immediate situational context: I have already eaten implies that I have already eaten food. He drinks implies that He drinks alcoholic drinks (and too often and too much). Deletion of the infinitive/gerund is common after certain transitive verbs (Andor 1998): I enjoyed the book means I enjoyed reading the book. Deletion of the instrument and other non-obligatory arguments of the verb is also common (Korponay 2001): Which hand do you write with? means In which hand do you hold the pen/ pencil you write with? Semantic ellipsis is present in certain types of lexical items and phrases, too: — Noun compounds: tomato salad is ‘salad made from tomatoes’, but Greek salad is not made from Greeks, and Waldorf salad is not made from Waldorfs. (This phenomenon is referred to in Hungarian linguistics as ‘jelentessürites’.) — Disjuncts: Frankly, I do not understand (> If I speak frankly, I must say that I do not understand. — Non-inherent adjectives: an angry letter is not angry, but the person who wrote it is angry; low nicotine smokers means ‘people smoking low nicotine content cigarettes.’ — Adjectives often juxtaposed with certain nouns may stand for the whole phrase: a mental may be a ‘mental case’, and commercial stands for ‘commercial advertisement’ (Szilagyi 1997). + 154 +
