The Development of the Concept of SMELL in American English - A Usage-Based View of Near-Synonymy

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.

About the author

Daniela Pettersson-Traba, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain.

Product details

• Authors: Daniela Pettersson-Traba
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Languages: English, German
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 21.10.2024
• EAN: 9783111631820
• ISBN: 978-3-11-163182-0
• No. of pages: 270
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 17 mm x 230 mm
• Weight: 583 g
• Illustrations: 25 b/w and 8 col. ill., 67 b/w tbl.
• Series: Applications of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL]
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Geruch, Historische und vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Semantik, Diskursanalyse, Stilistik, Linguistics, Computerlinguistik und Korpuslinguistik, Kollokation, Kognitive Linguistik, Bedeutungswandel, Historical & comparative linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Paperback Project, Semantics & pragmatics, Smell, Collocation, Near-Synonymy, Semantic Change