Slovak Temporal Adjectives of the Group “Real”: Issues of Synonymy and Quasi-Synonymy

Abstract

The article, based on the material of the Slovak National Corpus, examines the most common Slovak temporal adjectives with the general meaning "present" (súčasný, daný, prítomný, existujúci, terajší, momentálny, jestvujúci) from the perspective of their compatibility. Our aim is to verify existing dictionary interpretations and establish synonymy or quasi-synonymy relations between these lexemes. It is shown that adjectives differ depending on their focus on the external/internal space. Terajší and súčasný are focused on describing current situations, gravitating towards the vocabulary of the socio-political and economic spheres, to temporal lexemes and to personal names. At the same time, terajší tends to designate short-term situations or to label individuals, while súčasný focuses on relatively stable situations and designating aggregates of individuals. Prítomný is "socially oriented" and is associated with verbs denoting speech actions, with lexemes marking mass events, aggregates of people with quantifiers of community or with religious terminology. Existujúci and jestvujúci aim to describe the situation in the context of possible changes, they reveal a significant commonality of meaning; however, jestvujúci does not have a "spatial" fixity; in addition, existujúci focuses on a situation in the perspective of change, whereas jestvujúci focuses on a situation in its stability. The following two adjectives tend to be "mental space": daný is associated with the vocabulary of hyper-brevity, with adjectives denoting uniqueness, separateness. The adjectival momentalny is correlates with abstract substantives, with mental verbs, with deverbatives and is generally assigned to the field of reasoning and inference.

Received 20 May 2025

Revised 15 November 2025

Accepted 20 November 2025

For citation: Vashchenko, D. Yu., 2025. Slovak Temporal Adjectives of the Group “Real”: Issues of Synonymy and Quasi-Synonymy. Slavic World in the Third Millennium, 20 (3–4), pp. 215–236. https://doi.org/10.31168/2412-6446.2025.20.3-4.10