The beauty of communication. Corpus analysis of adverb categories in comments on communication activities in Polish (in light of comparative data from other languages)

Abstract

Currently, linguistic studies on (im)politeness from a first-order perspective constitute a fruitful alternative to classical second-order perspective attempts. However, information about (im)politeness is not solely derived from first-order perspective reports on interactions. Thus, the main purpose of this research was to discover the variety of adverbs that express assessments of both behavior in general and particular communication activities in first-order perspective reports, as well as to attempt a semantic typology of these adverbs, considered in the background of comparative data from other languages. Therefore, the study utilized two corpora of Polish: the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) and the Corpus of Narration about Communication (KNOK).

As a result, the analysis of the NKJP corpus showed that the adverbs co-occurring with the verb zachow(yw)ać się jakoś_i as its semantic complement form a set of diverse meanings. The semantic analysis enabled the assignment of each adverb to one of 18 semantic categories.

Moreover, the KNOK corpus analysis indicated that the adverbs ładnie, pięknie, and elegancko, which imply esthetic evaluation, were dominant in interaction reports. They were used together twice as often as the adverb grzecznie, which implies politeness. Additionally, overall, adverbs indicating the speaker's positive attitude toward the observed actions had a higher frequency than those indicating negative evaluation.

In conclusion, it was found that Polish language users tend to evaluate communicative activities in esthetic categories. This tendency was also observed in the Slovenian corpus but not in the English and Dutch corpora, suggesting that it may be specific to Slavic languages.