Collocation as a Measure of Semantic (Dis)similarity: Revisiting the Concept PLEASANT SMELLING

• Daniela Pettersson-Traba ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad Complutense de Madrid
• Localización: Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain / coord. por Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María del Carmen Camus Camus, Jesús Ángel González López, 2022, ISBN 978-84-19024-15-2, págs. 100-108
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper sets out to delineate and compare the diachronic evolution of the collocational preferences of five adjectival near-synonyms denoting the concept PLEASANT SMELLING in American English. A multiple distinctive collocate analysis is conducted by zooming in on the semantically modified nouns of the adjectives (e.g., soap in scented soap and the soap is scented). Previous analyses of the synonym set identified significant differences between them regarding the semantic category of nouns that they tend to collocate with (e.g., TEXTILE/CLOTHING and PLANTS/FLOWERS), thus uncovering their semantic preferences. In this contribution, the focus is on the synonyms’ idiosyncratic collocational patterns, as it has been demonstrated that even within particular semantic categories, related lexical items may exhibit more fine-grained collocational differences. The results uncover further distinctions between the members of the synonym set and thus shed valuable light on the development over time of the concept PLEASANT SMELLING.