Imrényi, András

Teaching syntax in the L1 classroom. The current practice and its challenges

 

The paper identifies outstanding issues and challenges faced by the traditional approach to sentence analysis in the L1 Hungarian classroom. The author highlights three problematic areas that need to be addressed. Firstly, it is argued that the distinction made between sentences and utterances serves little purpose other than legitimizing a general disregard for many aspects of discursive sentence meaning coded by word order and prosody. Secondly, it is shown that the notion of predicate, as now understood in Hungarian traditional grammar, has insufficient semantic and functional motivation. Thirdly, it is demonstrated that idiomatic multi-word patterns pose a challenge to the traditional analysis.