Argumentum, Vol. 21 (2025), pp. 1–13.

A corpus analysis of negative emotive words in Hungarian

(with special focus on their discursive functions)

Károly Bibok

    University of Szeged, Department of Russian Philology

    kbibok@lit.u-szeged.hu

Martina Katalin Szabó

    University of Szeged, Institute of Informatics

DOI: 10.34103/ARGUMENTUM/2025/1

Abstract

The present paper proposes a detailed scheme of the meaning structure of the semantic and pragmatic functions of two Hungarian negative emotive words: durva ‘rough’ and its adverbial derivative durván ‘roughly’ occurring within the three corpora which represent three different text domains. Then it presents the results of testing this scheme by annotating those corpora. Besides unproblematic cases, the paper also highlights ambiguous occurrences concerning the possible semantic and pragmatic values of durva ‘rough’ and durván ‘roughly’ as sentiment words and the differentiation between the discourse marker function and the sentiment one.

Keywords: negative emotive word, sentiment values, intensifier, discourse marker, corpus analysis

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