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

PREFACE This book is the first volume of a work planned to 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 Hungarian universities. It is hoped, however, that all others interested in the subject, practising teachers of English, for instance, may also 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 not intended to replace these, nor does it claim to be entirely original in outlook or treatment except for the occasional and necessary comparisons with Hungarian. This work is rather an attempt to make some of the achievements of recent grammatical thinking and methods in analysis more readily available to Hungarian students and the interested public in general 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 sÍB,náa,vá Introduction to the Pronunciation of English (1962) has been our constant guide for facts and information as well as in some 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: Groundworks 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 also profited from each other's criticism in making the final draft of the manuscript, of which Chapters 1—7 (and Appendix) were written byL.T. András and Chapters 8—10 by E. Stephanides. For whatever inconsistencies that