Ord i kombination - En undersökning av några adjektiv som uttrycker ’hög grad’

Abstract

The study presented in this article attempts to investigate the semantic preferences of three Swedish adjectives when used as attributes to express ‘a high degree’ of a noun headword: hård (Eng. hard or severe), kraftig (Eng. powerful) and stark (Eng. strong). In some semantic contexts the three adjectives seem practically interchangeable, while in other contexts only one of them sounds ‘correct’. For example, ‘a high degree’ of the word vind (Eng. wind or breeze) can be expressed by any of the adjectives hård, kraftig or stark, but ‘a high degree’ of the word känsla (Eng. feeling) is normally expressed only by the adjective stark. Through corpus searches and through organizing the head nouns into semantic fields I try to establish the semantic contexts in which the adjectives hård, kraftig and stark can be used to express ‘a high degree’ of a noun. The present investigation constitutes a pilot study of a larger research project on the use of intensifying Swedish adjectives and adverbs.