The development of the concept of SMELL in American English : a usage-based view of near-synonymy / Daniela Pettersson-Traba.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pettersson-Traba, Daniela, author.

Series:

Applications of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL]

Applications of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL] ; v.51

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English language--Variation--United States.

English language.

Language and smell.

English language--United States--Terms and phrases.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 pages)

Place of Publication:

Berlin, Germany ; Boston, Massachusetts : De Gruyter, [2022]

Summary:

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.

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

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

3-11-079229-X