The Use of the Hungarian Definite Conjugation in Hungarian as a Foreign Language by Speakers of Spanish

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of Hungarian as a foreign language by native speakers of Spanish. The results of an analysis of a spoken corpus are compared with data from previous research which used written texts and grammatical tests. Following a brief summary of the relevant key concepts of language acquisition the Hungarian definite conjugation is presented and data is analyzed to evaluate two main assumptions. The first assumption is that the most frequent errors can be associated with certain definite objects and that the errors found in a written corpus are identical with the ones that can be observed in speaking. Although the first assumption has not been confirmed the results draw the attention to the relevance of data collection methods. Our findings seem to support the second assumption which is based on the observation that the avoidance of grammatical structures may also be considered as a type of error, however, due to certain subresults it is not appropriate to draw conclusions.