Ongoing semantic change in a modernising society: a look at some adjectives from the olfactory domain in the Corpus of Historical American English

Abstract

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.