The Development of the Concept of SMELL in American English - A Usage-Based View of Near-Synonymy
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| Verlag | De Gruyter |
| Auflage | 2024 |
| Seiten | 270 |
| Format | 15,5 x 1,7 x 23,0 cm |
| Großformatiges Paperback. Klappenbroschur | |
| Gewicht | 583 g |
| Artikeltyp | Englisches Buch |
| Reihe | Applications of Cognitive Linguistics [ACL] 51 |
| ISBN-10 | 3111631826 |
| EAN | 9783111631820 |
| Bestell-Nr | 11163182A |
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-grain ed (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.
