The last couple of decades have witnessed a renewed interest in the semantic phenomenon ofnear-synonymy (e.g. Gries 2001; 2003; Taylor 2003; Divjak 2010; Liu 2010; 2013). Inparticular, recent distributional corpus-based approaches and techniques used for semanticanalysis, such as Behavioral Profiles (e.g. Divjak & Gries 2006; 2008) and correspondenceanalysis (e.g. Desagulier 2014; Krawczak 2018), have successfully uncovered subtledistinctions in meaning between near-synonyms by analyzing, among other factors, theircollocational and stylistic preferences. Some semantic domains have received particularattention, for instance, those of SIZE and AMOUNT (cf. Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1998: Section2.6 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 relativelyunderresearched. Moreover, most studies so far have dealt with the semantic structure of setsof 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 ofinvestigations 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 adjectivalnear-synonyms in the history of American English from the understudied semantic domain ofSMELL, namely fragrant, perfumed, scented, sweet-scented, and sweet-smelling, whichdesignate the concept PLEASANT SMELLING. To this end, instances of these five adjectives areretrieved from a large historical corpus of this variety of English, to wit, the Corpus ofHistorical American English (Davies 2010–), which covers the timespan 1810–2009. Thedistribution of the adjectives is analyzed over time across a wide range of contexts andfunctions, including semantic, morphosyntactic, stylistic, and collocational variables, sincedistributional 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 tovarious 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 intheir prototypical structures, from both an onomasiological and a semasiological perspective.Three separate analyses are conducted, each focusing on a different aspect of the internalsemantic structure of the near-synonym set. The first one (Chapter 5) examines the distributionof the five adjectives across senses and semantic categories of the nouns that they modify todiscover their prototypical uses in both semasiological and onomasiological terms. The secondanalysis (Chapter 6) delves deeper into the competition between the three most common ofthese near-synonyms (fragrant, perfumed, and scented) by expanding the range of contextsconsidered to cover also non-semantic and stylistic factors (e.g. syntactic function of theadjectives, degree, text-type). Finally, Chapter 7 accounts for the idiosyncratic collocationalbehavior of these three adjectives, hence zooming in on their specific collocational preferencesby using techniques which are specifically geared towards this issue.The results demonstrate that the near-synonym set under analysis is undergoing aprocess of semantic convergence, whereby the adjectives are progressively used in more similarsemantic contexts, becoming more and more frequent over time to designate artificial smells asopposed 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 theFirst and Second Industrial Revolutions, which have led to an ever-increasing need to refer toartificially scented products rather than to naturally fragrant plants and flowers. Moreover, thisprocess of convergence is accompanied by one of substitution, in which the initially mostdominant 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 lexicalnear-synonyms, a dimension that has up to now been relatively disregarded in the specializedliterature and that is yet to receive the attention it certainly deserves.
