An Outline of Present-day English Structure I. [antikvár]

PREFACE This book is the first volumeofa work plannedto appear in three parts treating of the phonological, morphological and syntactic structure of present-day British English. It is designed to meet, in the first place, undergraduate requirements at Hungárián universities. It is hoped, however, that all others interested in the subject, practising teachers of English, fór instance, may alsó find a work of this nature useful as a concise introduction or as a stepping-stone to more advanced and technical discussions of English grammar of which there is an abundance in English and other languages. Our book is nőt intended to replace these, nor does it claim to be entirely originál in outlook or treatment except for the occasional and neeessary comparisons with Hungárián. This work is rather an attempt to make somé of the achievements of recent grammatical thinking and methods in analysis more readily available to Hungárián students and the interested public in generál in a pedagogical form that seemed to us at the moment the fittest to present them. Among the authors, too many to enumerate here by name (but see Select Bibliography, pp. 154—55, in this first part on the phonetics and phonology of English we are most heavily indebted to Prof. A. C. Gimson of University College, London, whose standard Introduction to the Pronunciation of English (1962) has been our constant guide for facts and information as well as in somé questions of presentation. In the second part dealing with connected speech, besides the work of Prof. Gimson, our main source has been J. D. O'Connor and G. F. Arnold: Introduction of Colloquial English and Roger Kingdon's two standard works: Oroundworks of English Stress and Groundwork of English Intonation. The system and the examples for intonation are mainly taken from J. D. O'Connor's handbook. We wish to thank Mr. István Véges of the University of Economics, Budapest, and Mr. Béla Korponay of Debrecen University who read the manuscript and offered many valuable suggestions as to how to make our work more useful. We have alsó profited from each other's criticism in making the final draft of the manuscript, of which Chapters 1—7 (and Appendix) were written by L.T. András and Chapters 8—10 by E. Stephanides. For whatever inconsistencies that remain in the two parts despite our efforts to eliminate them, we offer our apology,