“…The former pair is typically treated as synonymous, but the latter is not, since hardly would rather go along with rarely and barely, while seldom would take on a higher value. If we consider some learner corpus studies, in which seldom was found to be infrequently (Rabadán, & Izquierdo, 2013) or never used (Bobkina, & Stefanova Radoulska, 2018) by L2 English learners, we may assume that this slight discrepancy in the participants' judgements (perceiving hardly and seldom as synonymous) may be the cause of assigning lower values to the latter adverb. In a similar vein, hierarchical cluster analysis performed in quantification force research revealed that there is one tier containing, among others, never, rarely and seldom, termed minority quantificational force, and another tier including, among others, many and often, termed majority quantificational force (Alstott, & Jasbi, 2020).…”