What are these little things? Hungarian constructions with the discourse particles 'is' and 'szintén' (’also’), and their teaching

Abstract

The paper discusses the various expressions that the Hungarian is ’also’ and szintén ’also’ can appear in with
different pragma-semantic meanings. We argue that these elements should be taught in the Hungarian class as discourse particles, and as parts of extended expressions or constructions. The paper consists of two parts. In the theoretical part, we review the literature and present our own research findings related to the examined expressions
– discussing not only their logical, but also their intentional profiles. In the practical part, using freely available sample tasks from language exams and graduation exams as a corpus, we point out which types of the examined expressions learners of Hungarian are expected to know at which proficiency levels. We also propose classroom exercises and tasks for each construction type.