A preliminary corpus-based diachronic analysis of the behavioral profile of a set of near-synonyms in American English

Abstract

The present master dissertation, which is a preliminary corpus-based behavioral profile (henceforth BP) study examines the competition and usage patterns of the attributive uses of the following set of adjective near-synonyms in American English from a diachronic perspective with data from the Corpus of Historical American English (henceforth COHA): perfumed, fragrant, scented, and sweet-smelling.2 My main objective is to analyze the lexical items’ collocational behavior throughout the history of American English. This is done with the intention of unfolding their distributional patterns and fine-grained aspects of meaning, information which is indispensable in order to establish differences between the near-synonyms, but which is not provided in dictionaries of synonyms and thesauri.