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.