Frequent collocations with the adverb 'nagyon' (‘very’) in the light of a learner corpus and a pedagogical corpus

Abstract

The corpus-based study focuses on frequently occurring collocations of the adverb nagyon (‘very’), which is the most frequent adverb in the KorSzak learner corpus. First, those collocations of nagyon are identified in the learner corpus that occur with the greatest statistical frequency, then, the findings are compared to similar collocations in the MagyarOK open pedagogical corpus. The aim is to answer the following three questions. Do learners of Hungarian as a foreign language use the same collocations with nagyon in their written output as those present in the written texts of native speakers and course materials? Do they underuse or maybe overuse any of the collocations? Are there any collocations with nagyon that learners consider as safe options and apply as ’collocational teddy bears’? The study also examines, comparatively, the lexico-grammatical and semantic characteristics of two collocations of nagyon that were found the most frequent in both corpora: nagyon_ADV szeret_V (‘like very much’) and nagyon_ADV szép_A (‘very nice’).