Semantically marked english subjects: potential and actual areas of difficulty from the point of view of hungarian learners of enlish

Abstract

L2 learners of English often come across sentences such as Next month sees the president in town or The hospital treats people with a rare condition. These sentences are challenging because of the non-agentive semantic roles they take in their subject position. I have set the goal of the present paper to document how 65 Hungarian learners at various levels of English proficiency cope with a range of non-agentive roles; and whether the semantically marked subjects pose an area of difficulty for them. The present study has great potential because of its major pedagogical implications and the valuable insights it provides into the typological differences between English and Hungarian.

El fin de este artículo es documentar como alumnos húngaros de inglés con distintos niveles se manejan con una gama de funciones no agentivas y si ésta les presenta dificultades. El estudio presenta importantes implicaciones pedagógicas y la introspección que proporciona en cuanto a las diferencias tipológicas entre inglés y húngaro.