From Cheap to Affordable – Corpus-Assisted Exploration of Near-Synonymy in English, German, and Slovak Economic Discourse
From Cheap to Affordable – Corpus-Assisted Exploration of Near-Synonymy in English, German, and Slovak Economic Discourse

Summary/Abstract: This study explores the lexical-semantic behaviour of near-synonyms in economic discourse across English, German, and Slovak. It focuses on high-frequency lexical pairs such as cheap–affordable, billig–preiswert, and lacný–výhodný. The analysis examines how these items differ in semantic prosody, collocational behaviour, and sentiment function within their respective languages. The study is grounded in two central hypotheses. First, polysemous adjectives cheap, billig, lacný are expected to occur more frequentl in neutral or negative sentiment contexts. Second, less polysemous adjectives affordable, preiswert, výhodný are assumed to appear predominantly in positive contexts. To test these assumptions, economic subcorpora from the TenTen family were analysed via Sketch Engine. The strongest nominal collocates were extracted using logDice and subsequently grouped into semantic domains. Cross-linguistic translation issues were also taken into account. Sentiment analysis was performed on concordance lines using AI-assisted tools and Microsoft Excel. Each instance was labelled as positive, neutral, or negative. Chi-square tests were applied to assess whether the observed sentiment distributions deviated significantly from a uniform expectation. The statistical analyses do not confirm either of the proposed hypotheses. However, the data reveal observable tendencies. Less polysemous adjectives occur more frequently in contexts with positive connotations, whereas polysemous adjectives show a broader sentiment range that includes neutral and negative contexts. These tendencies remain descriptively noticeable but do not reach statistical significance, and the distributions show deviations that prevent clear confirmation of the hypotheses. Together, the collocational and sentiment-based analyses contribute to a detailed reconstruction of semantic prosody and illustrate how synonymic variation functions within the economic register of each language.

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