The Development of the Concept of SMELL in American English : : A Usage-Based View of Near-Synonymy / / Daniela Pettersson-Traba.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2022 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Pettersson-Traba, Daniela,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Applications of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL] , 51
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XVIII, 270 p.)

The last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in near-synonymy. In particular, recent distributional corpus-based approaches used for semantic analysis have successfully uncovered subtle distinctions in meaning between near-synonyms. However, most studies have dealt with the semantic structure of sets of near-synonyms from a synchronic perspective, while their diachronic evolution generally has been neglected. Against this backdrop, the aim of this book is to examine five adjectival near-synonyms in the history of American English from the understudied semantic domain of SMELL: fragrant, perfumed, scented, sweet-scented, and sweet-smelling. Their distribution is analyzed across a wide range of contexts, including semantic, morphosyntactic, and stylistic ones, since distributional patterns of this type serve as a proxy for semantic (dis)similarity. The data is submitted to various univariate and multivariate statistical techniques, making it possible to uncover fine-grained (dis)similarities among the near-synonyms, as well as possible changes in their prototypical structures. The book sheds valuable light on the diachronic development of lexical near-synonyms, a dimension that has up to now been relatively disregarded.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- List of abbreviations -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Synonymy -- 3 The concept pleasant smelling -- 4 Semasiological and onomasiological analyses of the synonym set -- 5 In-depth onomasiological analysis of the synonym set: A multivariate approach -- 6 Idiosyncratic collocational preferences of the near-synonyms -- 7 The concept pleasant smelling: A victim of societal change? -- 8 Concluding remarks and suggestions for future research -- List of references and sources -- Appendix -- Index