Slovak and Hungarian adverbs of the “soon” group according to corpus data

Abstract

The article examines four of the most commonly used Slovak and Hungarian adverbs belonging to the semantic group “soon”. Slovak and Hungarian, not being related, have been in close contact for a long time within the same state in Central Europe. At the same time, direct borrowings from Hungarian to Slovak, as well as Slavisms in Hungarian, have been studied well, while the question of possible semantic parallels in these languages remains practically unexplored. In particular, there are a number of formal correspondences between the adverbs of the group “soon” in Slovak and Hungarian, which overlap in a complex way with semantic correlations. The materials of the national corpora of the Slovak and the Hungarian languages, as well as the Slovak and the Hungarian corpora of the Aranea family of Internet corpora are used in the work. The compatibility of these adverbs is analyzed according to the logDice association measure; data on the mutual compatibility of lexemes are also accounted for. It is shown that we can speak about the relative semantic correlation of a pair of adverbs focused on directly observed situations and adverbs denoting rationally perceived, controlled situations. At the same time, the adverbs that mark the existence of a certain situation, as well as adverbs denoting a rapid change of situations, are more semantically isolated in the Hungarian language.