Slovak temporal adverbs čoskoro, onedlho, o chvíľu: a case of quasi-synonymy

Abstract

The article uses the material of the Slovak national corpus to examine the lexical meaning of the Slovak adverbs čoskoro, onedlho, o chvíľu. Their semantics presupposes a rapid onset of the situation in relation to the moment of speech or to the moment in the text. In the dictionaries of the Slovak language, these lexemes are usually not differentiated, which raises the question of their synonymy or quasi-synonymy. In the first part of the article, collocations of these adverbs are analyzed in the light of the logDice Association measure. In the second part, cases of mutual compatibility of lexemes are considered pairwise. It is shown that čoskoro tends to cooccur with mental verbs and verbs with the semantics of termination and disappearance, onedlho – with verbs with the meaning of achieving a goal, passing of time, or waiting, while o chvíľu is characterized by collocations with perceptual verbs. When adverbs cooccur in the same stretch of text, the situation indicated by onedlho usually follows the situation with čoskoro, and is most often related to it causally. O chvíľu more often denotes completed or predetermined situations, excluding the possibility of doubt. Thus, čoskoro is more focused on the interpretation of the situation by the speaker, onedlho – on the situation in its course, and o chvíľu – on the direct perception of the situation by the speaker with the ability to control the situation.