A corpus-based study on near-synonymythe concept pleasant smelling in 19th- and 20th-century american english

Resumo

The last couple of decades have witnessed a renewed interest in the semantic phenomenon of near-synonymy (e.g. Gries 2001; 2003; Taylor 2003; Divjak 2010; Liu 2010; 2013). In particular, recent distributional corpus-based approaches and techniques used for semantic analysis, such as Behavioral Profiles (e.g. Divjak & Gries 2006; 2008) and correspondence analysis (e.g. Desagulier 2014; Krawczak 2018), have successfully uncovered subtle distinctions in meaning between near-synonyms by analyzing, among other factors, their collocational and stylistic preferences. Some semantic domains have received particular attention, for instance, those of SIZE and AMOUNT (cf. Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1998: Section 2.6 on big, large, and great; Taylor 2003 on high and tall; and Gries & Otani 2010 on big, large, and great and little, small, and tiny), while other near-synonym sets have been relatively underresearched. Moreover, most studies so far have dealt with the semantic structure of sets of near-synonyms from a synchronic perspective (e.g. Divjak & Gries 2006; 2008; Liu 2010; 2013), whereas their diachronic evolution has generally been neglected, with only a handful of investigations adopting a historical approach (e.g. Kaunisto 2001; Primahadi-Wijaya-R & Rajeg 2014). Against this backdrop, the aim of the present dissertation is to examine five adjectival near-synonyms in the history of American English from the understudied semantic domain of SMELL, namely fragrant, perfumed, scented, sweet-scented, and sweet-smelling, which designate the concept PLEASANT SMELLING. To this end, instances of these five adjectives are retrieved from a large historical corpus of this variety of English, to wit, the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2010–), which covers the timespan 1810–2009. The distribution of the adjectives is analyzed over time across a wide range of contexts and functions, including semantic, morphosyntactic, stylistic, and collocational variables, since distributional patterns of this type have been shown to serve as a proxy for semantic (dis)similarity (e.g. Divjak & Gries 2006; 2008; Gries & Otani 2010). The data is submitted to various univariate and multivariate statistical techniques in order to uncover fine-grained (dis)similarities among the members of this near-synonym set, as well as possible changes in their prototypical structures, from both an onomasiological and a semasiological perspective. Three separate analyses are conducted, each focusing on a different aspect of the internal semantic structure of the near-synonym set. The first one (Chapter 5) examines the distribution of the five adjectives across senses and semantic categories of the nouns that they modify to discover their prototypical uses in both semasiological and onomasiological terms. The second analysis (Chapter 6) delves deeper into the competition between the three most common of these near-synonyms (fragrant, perfumed, and scented) by expanding the range of contexts considered to cover also non-semantic and stylistic factors (e.g. syntactic function of the adjectives, degree, text-type). Finally, Chapter 7 accounts for the idiosyncratic collocational behavior of these three adjectives, hence zooming in on their specific collocational preferences by using techniques which are specifically geared towards this issue. The results demonstrate that the near-synonym set under analysis is undergoing a process of semantic convergence, whereby the adjectives are progressively used in more similar semantic contexts, becoming more and more frequent over time to designate artificial smells as opposed to natural ones. This change is here claimed to be motivated by extralinguistic factors, to wit, the social and technological transformations experienced by American society after the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, which have led to an ever-increasing need to refer to artificially scented products rather than to naturally fragrant plants and flowers. Moreover, this process of convergence is accompanied by one of substitution, in which the initially most dominant adjective of the set (fragrant) is gradually being replaced by another one (scented). Therefore, the findings obtained shed valuable light on the diachronic development of lexical near-synonyms, a dimension that has up to now been relatively disregarded in the specialized literature and that is yet to receive the attention it certainly deserves.