Prosody

After the discussion of segmental issues, let us turn our attention to two suprasegmental features that are especially relevant in the discussion of Hunglish: stress (to be presented in Section 3.5.1) and intonation (Section 3.5.2).

3.5.1 Stress

The pronunciation difficulties of Hungarian learners of English related to stress are rooted in a number of salient differences in the stress systems of English and Hungarian. In this section we provide an overview of the most important differences, but we will revisit these issues in Section 5.2, where some of them will be elaborated on in slightly more detail.

Firstly, while main stress is fixed on the first syllable of words in Hungarian, in English stress may fall on practically any syllable of words. The placement of both primary and secondary stress are governed by numerous rules, but as the rules are highly complex at least compared to Hungarian, and the number of exceptions is not insignificant either, English stress rules are characterised by unpredictability to a larger extent than by predictability, especially from the point of view of a learner. To mention a few examples illustrating the complexity of rules of stress placement in English, stress placement is determined by morphosyntactic category (function words behave differently from content words, and different rules of primary stress placement apply to nouns, verbs and adjectives/adverbs), and the morphological structure of words also plays a role in stress placement as there exist certain affix types which are able to change the stress pattern of the stem (stress-fixing affixes cf. décorate vs. decorátion) besides other types which do not affect the pronunciation of the stem (stress-neutral affixes, cf. décorate vs. décorating, décorated).

Secondly, English differs from Hungarian in its treatment of stressed and unstressed syllables: in stressed syllables in English, only so-called full (or stressed or strong) vowels occur, while unstressed ones only have reduced (or unstressed or weak) vowels, namely [ə], [ɪ]

and [ʊ] – of these three, only [ə] is restricted to unstressed position; the other two may be stressed, too. The distinction of full and reduced vowels does not apply to Hungarian:

Hungarian stress is independent of vowels, that is, each vowel may occur both in stressed and unstressed positions.

Thirdly (and not unrelated to the previous two issues), it is possible in English that two words are the same in terms of the segments they are composed of, and they differ only in terms of word stress placement such as impórt (verb) and ímport (noun) – such pairs of words are referred to as stress minimal pairs. In Hungarian, stressed and unstressed syllables are unable to account for meaning differences within morphemes (cf. Kálmán & Nádasdy 2016); such examples are necessarily morphologically complex in Hungarian, e.g., ez üst (‘this is a cauldron’) vs. ezüst. (‘silver’).

Finally, there is a basic typological difference between English and Hungarian in terms of speech rhythm. On the one hand, Hungarian has syllable-timed rhythm, that is, in Hungarian speech the duration of each syllable is approximately the same (cf. Kovács & Siptár 2010: 2;

Siptár & Törkenczy 2000: 13). The speech rhythm of English, on the other hand, is syllable-timed, that is, it is not the duration of syllables that is the same, but the interval between two stresses (regardless of how many unstressed syllables are in between two rhythmic beats). It follows from the syllable-timed rhythm of English that the more unstressed syllables there are between two stressed ones, the more compressed the unstressed syllables will become, which leads to various phenomena such as vowel reduction in general, the weak pronunciations of some short grammar words, and syncope (or weak vowel deletion).

Based on the above discussion of the many differences between the two languages in terms of stress placement, we can conclude that a Hungarian learner’s pronunciation of English can be characterised by at least two salient stress-related features: Firstly, they may not pronounce weak forms at all, which is less problematic in terms of being intelligible (“all-strong-form” pronunciations can only lead to misunderstandings concerning unnecessary emphasis, besides being found generally unnatural by native speakers, cf. Balogné Bérces &

Szentgyörgyi 2006: 101), but it may cause serious problems in terms of understanding native English speech, as the expectation to hear strong forms may make the weak forms completely unrecognisable.

Secondly, a Hungarian learner may not recognise the importance of stress at all and apply initial word stress in all English words (e.g., a word like committee, if stressed on the first syllable, may be understood as comedy – Szpyra-Kozłowska 2015: 72), which may not only cause difficulties for them in making themselves understood by native speakers in general, but this can also lead to problems with word recognition. The existence of a number of Hungarian

“false friends” does not make matters easier, as a frequent mispronunciation of a word like analysis (with stress on the first syllable, i.e., [ˈɛnølajsis]) may have been influenced by its Hungarian equivalent analízis. Nevertheless, stress-related pronunciation errors may not only be rooted in applying the Hungarian regularity. Some learners may produce forms originating from the over-application of English stress rules, and, for instance, stress the penultimate syllable of certain words such as interesting or adjective (in which initial stress would be correct, but which are frequently mispronounced by Hungarians with stress falling on the second syllable), or transfer the stress-fixing pattern (as in dècorátion) to stress-neutral examples, which gives rise to pronunciations like dècoráting and dècoráted. (Such examples will be considered as cases of hypercorrection later in Section 5.2.)

3.5.2 Intonation

In a final subsection dealing with Hunglish pronunciation errors rooted in L1 transfer, we list the most important differences between English and Hungarian in terms of pitch patterns, that is, intonation.

Perhaps the most salient difference between English and Hungarian intonation is that the pitch range used by the former is approximately twice as wide as the one used by the latter (Kovács & Siptár 2010: 3). What follows from this is that English speech may be (and is very often) perceived by Hungarians as affected – the “singsong” intonation of English is even considered annoying by some, and it makes many learners cringe when they hear demonstrations of English intonation, let alone when they try to imitate it. Similarly, from the point of view of English speakers, Hungarian intonation (and thus Hunglish) is likely to be perceived as monotonous or even cold, giving the impression of boredom or indifference.

Another important difference is that while in English the change from the highest pitch to the lowest or vice versa is concentrated in one particular syllable (usually the primary stressed syllable of the last content word in the sentence, i.e., the syllable that carries sentence stress), in Hungarian the pitch levels may go up and down several times in a sentence (Kovács & Siptár 2010: 4).

As for difficulties with particular tones, there are numerous ways in which English and Hungarian differ, but since a complete list is beyond our purposes, we only mention two examples which may cause the most serious difficulties for a Hungarian learner of English. The most problematic tone for Hungarian speakers (though not in terms of production, but perception) is the low rising tone (cf. Nádasdy 2006: 285), because this tone is only used for questions in Hungarian, but it is never used for this purpose in English, but for responding to what someone has said (in most cases, the low rising tone expresses certain attitudes such as indifference). Therefore, Hungarians may misinterpret sentences with a low rising tone as questions.

In terms of production, the tone that is problematic for Hungarians is the one used in Yes/No questions, namely the high rising tone. Not producing this tone correctly and applying the characteristic Hungarian rise-fall instead in Yes/No questions may at least express boredom or indifference, but it may even prevent the sentence from being interpreted as a question (Kovács & Siptár 2010: 8–9, Nádasdy 2006: 287). More details and further examples are beyond the scope of the discussion here.