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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CONTRASTS. A PRACTICAL APPROACH 12.2 TYPOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES: THE SYNTACTIC LEVEL From the syntactic point of view, languages are usually classified on the basis of word order. The two commonest word orders are SVO (subject, verb, object) and SOV (subject, object, verb). English belongs to the SVO type; Hungarian is a topic-prominent language, in which both the SVO and the SOV word orders may occur. Hungarian sentences are divided into a topic part and a predicate part, with the topic functioning as the logical subject of the predication (E. Kiss 2002: 2). Put another way, English is a subject-prominent language, while Hungarian is topic-prominent. In English, the topic and the grammatical subject roles have to coincide. The relative freedom of word order of Hungarian is made possible by its rich morphology. This typological difference may cause difficulties for Hungarian learners: it takes some time to get used to a fixed word order and to learn that changes in emphasis, at least in writing, cannot be expressed by simply changing the word order as in Hungarian. The rich morphology of Hungarian is also responsible for another characteristic feature: it is a pro-drop language, i.e., subject and object pronouns are dropped unless they are stressed. However, this feature is rarely transferred into English: Hungarian learners will easily switch to using pronouns instead of verbal inflections. 12.3 TYPOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES: THE PHONOLOGICAL AND PROSODIC LEVEL The main differences at the phonological level concern differences in the phoneme inventories of English and Hungarian, in the vowel and consonant systems as well as in the articulation of individual vowels and consonants and in phonological processes like assimilation. Negative transfer, i.e., substitution of L1 Hungarian speech sounds for L2 English sounds is common, and some pronunciation mistakes may easily fossilise, resulting in a typical Hunglish accent. Even more important are the prosodic differences. According to language typology, Hungarian is a syllable-timed language, while English is stress-timed. This difference has serious consequences for Hungarian learners. One consequence of stress-timing is that unstressed syllables in English will be weak, and the vowels of weak syllables will be reduced. Vowel reduction does not occur in Hungarian. Consequently, a distinctive feature of a Hunglish accent is non-reduction of vowels in weak syllables (including unstressed function words). Forgács (2007: 44) notes the same problem in connection with German: Hungarian learners tend to pronounce the German ending -en too clearly. The difficulties for a Hungarian learner of English are compounded by variable * 218 +
