Slovak temporal adverbs mnohokrát and veľakrát, the specificity of lexical meaning according to compatibility data

Abstract

The article considers the issue of synonymy/quasi-synonymy of the Slovak temporal adverbs mnohokrát and veľakrát, which belong to the semantic group “often”, based on the material of the Slovak National Corpus. The meaning of the lexemes included here assumes that a certain situation is repeated, and the speaker considers the number of such repetitions to be high. The analysis is carried out on the base of the compatibility of these adverbs in the Corpus. First, the indicators of the logDice association measure (the distance between collocates from –6 to 6 tokens) are considered, it is shown that the lists of words ranked by this measure are mostly the same for both lexemes, veľakrát has a certain specificity, which has a high degree of association with adverbial modifiers marking an extremely high frequency of a situation, or with constructions suggesting a detailed explication of its causes. The frequency context of the appearance of both adverbs in the text is thus a comparison of the real state of affairs with the desired one. In the second part of the article, the joint occurrence of adverbs from this semantic group is considered, including the compatibility of mnohokrát and veľakrát with the more frequent adverbs často and neraz. In this case, mnohokrát and veľakrát are used either for a detailed explication of the state of affairs, or to indicate directly observed situations. As follows from the analysis, the adverbs mnohokrát and veľakrát are almost complete synonyms, the difference between them is that the specified specificity of the meaning (high frequency of repetition, direct observability) is more pronounced in veľakrát than in mnohokrát.