The Slovene theory of language naturalness and the questions of co-naturalness and frequency criteria in the study of Slovene corpora

The article presents the development of the Slovene theory of linguistic naturalness and its methodological transformations over the past decade (for example, modifications in the representation of naturalness scales, changes in the application of the theory’s criteria, and the placing of the speaker at the center of the research focus). It highlights two central issues arising from the study of Slovenian language data: how the theory of naturalness should ad­dress (morpho)syntactic variants that are regarded as less appropriate or incorrect according to the standard norm, yet function as living, co-natural elements of the language; how to apply the principles of frequency in contexts where sources of material for the non-standard language are lacking. The article highlights two phenomena in which contradictions arise from the clash between unnatural linguistic features and the frequency criteria, as shaped by the regulation of the standard language. These are: (1) polvikanje in vikanje (agreement in verb form within forms of address combining formal and informal elements); and (2) coordinated prepositional phrases of the type pred predavanji in po predavanjih (before the lectures and after the lectures), which are colloquially shortened to ((pred in po preda­vanjih – before and after the lectures), even though the nouns in the prepositional phrases appear in different cases (pred uporabo – accusative; po uporabi – locative).