Associative relations of Serbian adjectives in the free association verbal test

Abstract

Previous research on the associative relations of adjectives is not unanimous in terms of whether participants more often respond by using nouns or adjectives in free association tests. On the other hand, when it comes to paradigmatic associative relationships, researchers agree that native speakers respond to adjective stimuli mostly by associations of opposite meaning, but generally do not state the percentage, since conclusions are often made on the basis of the dominant associate, and not upon the entire associative field. Therefore, 45 associative fields of adjectives of the Serbian language are analyzed based on the material obtained from two associative dictionaries, prepared on the basis of the responses of 800 participants (ranging from 18 to 25 years of age) and 1,200 participants of different ages (groups of 5, 9, 13 and 17 years of age, each of which comprised 300 participants). The aim of this study is to examine the ratio of syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations of adjectives, as well as the paradigmatic type of relation between the adjective-type stimuli and their associates (the closeness and the oppositeness of meaning and other types of associative relations). The material was annotated according to parts of speech, as well as according to the types of associative relations. The quantitative results showed that the associations of examined adjectives are slightly more frequently syntagmatic (52%) than paradigmatic (44%), while the oppositeness of meaning proved to be the most common as well as the strongest associative relation of commonly used adjectives of the Serbian language.