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

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 Corpu...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Pettersson-Traba, Daniela
Format: master thesis
Publication Date:2015
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (USC)
Repository:Minerva. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:minerva.usc.gal:10347/15143
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10347/15143
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Materias::Investigación::57 Lingüística::5705 Lingüística sincrónica::570508 Semántica
Materias::Investigación::57 Lingüística::5703 Geografía lingüística
Materias::Investigación::57 Lingüística::5702 Lingüística diacrónica::570201 Lingüística histórica
Materias::Investigación::57 Lingüística::5701 Lingüística aplicada::570104 Lingüística informatizada
Description
Summary: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.