This paper presents a diachronic analysis of the attributive uses of four synonymous adjectives which designate the concept of sweet-smelling (fragrant, perfumed, scented, and sweet-smelling) in the latter part of Late Modern and Present-day American English. By drawing on data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and applying a Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis (HCFA), it delineates the internal semantic structure of this set of synonyms, paying special attention to their noun collocates. The results show that the concept of sweet-smelling experiences major changes over the time span examined (1850–2009), from being used mostly to qualify entities which can exhibit a natural pleasant smell (e.g. flowers and trees) to modifying objects which are artificially sweet-smelling (e.g. oils and shampoos). Moreover, fragrant and perfumed, which initially were the most frequent adjectives, are gradually replaced by scented, thus reflecting a change in the relation between the synonyms over time. The study constitutes the first diachronic approximation to synonymy from the perspective of cognitive semantics and provides equally effective results as previous synchronic research in the field.
As a diachronic corpus-based investigation into onomasiological variation, this study has two main objectives. First, the paper analyses the evolution of the concept of sweet-smelling as a whole – that is, as instantiated by the three near-synonymous adjectives, fragrant, perfumed and scented, with a focus on language-external pressures for distributional changes. There seems to exist variation over time in the nouns that the concept typically collocates with, going from nouns referring to entities with a natural, pleasant smell to entities with an artificial agreeable aroma. It is here argued that this change is motivated by the social and technological transformations experienced by American society after the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, a claim that finds preliminary empirical support in the distribution from 1820 to 2009 of a series of lexical indicators from the semantic domains of cleaning, cosmetics and textile & clothing. Second, the distribution over time of the three adjectives is examined. The data point to a reorganisation concerning the internal semantic structure of the synonym set, with scented gaining ground at the expense of fragrant and perfumed in several contexts of use. Furthermore, the adjectives exhibit highly idiosyncratic collocational preferences, which go a long way towards explaining the alternation between them.
The volume under review, edited by Paula Rautionaho, Arja Nurmi, and Juhani Klemola, presents selected papers from the 39th ICAME conference, celebrated in Tampere in 2018. As its title suggests, it delves into the main theme of the conference, corpus linguistics and the changing society, thus bringing to the fore diachronic studies in which the interplay between linguistic changes and societal developments -be they cultural or technological -is explored. The volume comprises eleven original and thought-provoking chapters by both renowned and emerging scholars in the field of corpus linguistics. These contributions are organized into two separate parts, with the first dealing explicitly with linguistic changes that seem to respond to changes in the extralinguistic reality. Several chapters in this part of the volume also address the viability of corpora to examine the interrelation between language and society. The second part presents studies which survey language changes that are not directly connected to social advancements, but which are instead motivated by intralinguistic processes, including grammaticalization, among others.Part I opens with Martin Hilpert's chapter, a call for caution regarding research on social change and its reflection in diachronic corpora. Hilpert first draws attention to five problems to bear in mind when connecting corpus findings to extralinguistic developments. These five problems are subsequently described, and compelling counterexamples are presented to show how corpus results might be misleading if these methodological pitfalls are not considered when designing our studies and analyzing our data. Then, a case study on the English make-causative construction is provided to implement the ideas previously discussed. Taking as a starting point Greenfield's (2013) claim that the diminishing power of interpersonal authority over time is reflected in the lexicon through a decrease in the frequency of words instantiating this concept (e.g., authority, obedience), Hilpert hypothesizes that the makecausative construction, which also expresses interpersonal authority (e.g., don't make me marry him), could mirror this change as well. However, after a systematic analysis that avoids the problems identified
This chapter analyzes the diachronic development in 19th- and 20th-century American English of the synonyms fragrant, perfumed, and scented, which denote the concept sweet-smelling. Their distributional patterns are examined by means of conditional inference trees and collocational networks in order to (1) uncover distinctions in meaning between the synonyms and (2) determine the changes that the concept sweet-smelling has experienced and their effect on the relationship between the synonyms. Results indicate a significant split between entities denoting natural and artificial smells, associated with fragrant and perfumed, respectively. In turn, scented is common in both senses. Moreover, a significant increase of scented at the expense of fragrant and perfumed emerges over time, a fact which can be accounted for in terms of processes of attraction, differentiation, and ongoing replacement.
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