A diachronic perspective on near-synonymy: The concept of sweet-smelling in American English

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a diachronic analysis of the attributive uses of four synonymous adjectives which designate the concept ofsweet-smelling(fragrant, perfumed, scented, andsweet-smelling) in the latter part of Late Modern and Present-day American English. By drawing on data from theCorpus 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 ofsweet-smellingexperiences major changes over the time span examined (1850–2009), from being used mostly to qualify entities which can exhibit anaturalpleasant smell (e.g. flowers and trees) to modifying objects which areartificiallysweet-smelling (e.g. oils and shampoos). Moreover,fragrantandperfumed, which initially were the most frequent adjectives, are gradually replaced byscented, 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.