Verb Paronyms in the Croatian Language

Abstract

A word that is similar in form of derivation but different in meaning is known as a paronym. Due to a similarity of form, speakers often deviate from the norm when using verb paronyms in everyday communication. The theoretical part of the paper discusses their determination. The results of a few previous research are also presented. The second part of the paper presents the research which was carried out on the sample of 109 participants via an anonymous questionnaire that comprised a sentence completion task (two tasks, each containing ten sentences with root or prefixal verb paronyms). All the answers were then presented, and divided into three groups – according to three criteria: education, mother tongue, and the concept of “jat“. The research aimed to determine whether respondents deviate from the norm of the Croatian standard language when using verb paronyms, as well as to determine whether they recognize the difference between paronymic pairs and whether they use the appropriate verb in the given context. The results confirmed the hypothesis that the respondents are familiar with the difference between the prefixal paronymic pairs. The worse results were achieved in the first task, in which the respondents were asked to recognize the root paronymic verb in a certain context. The results of the research confirm Tafra's (2003) conclusion, drawn from the necessity of making a dictionary of paronyms, which would contain an explanation of each paronymic pair, as well as a list of the most common mistakes in their use.