The fast-over-slow asymmetry: speed adverbs in Estonian

Abstract Linguistic asymmetries have been of great interest in much research and continue to provide intriguing insights into the working mechanisms of language. Focusing on the domain of speed , we explore the structure of Estonian speed adverbs and provide evidence for the fast-over-slow asymmetry – the tendency for fastness to be expressed more extensively than slowness. As a pre-study, in which we combined dictionary lookup, corpus and rating methods, we compiled a list of 419 speed adverbs, with 369 representing the clearest instances. The main study revealed that the number of unique fast adverbs (e.g. kiiresti ‘fast, quickly’) is more than four times larger than that of slow adverbs (e.g. aeglaselt ‘slowly’). Comparing the 30 most frequent fast adverbs to the 30 most frequent slow adverbs further showed that the token frequency of fast adverbs, as attested in the Estonian National Corpus 2021, is significantly higher than that of slow adverbs. Nevertheless, the meaning of fast adverbs was not intensified by prefixoids (e.g. hüperkiiresti ‘hyper fast’) and reduplication (e.g. kiiresti - kiiresti ‘quickly-quickly’) more frequently than that of slow adverbs. The study suggests that the widely acknowledged inherent asymmetry in polar antonyms is rooted in the general asymmetry in lexicon, which, in turn, reflects cognitive asymmetries.