Resumen de Lexical Variation in the History of American English: Attraction and Differentiation in a Synonym Set
Daniela Beatriz Pettersson Traba
The present study considers the recent history of three near-synonymous adjectives from the olfactory domain, namely fragrant, perfumed and scented in American English. The contexts of use of these adjectives are examined across four fifty-year periods from 1810 to 2009, focusing particularly on semantic characteristics of the nouns they typically modify with the aim of investigating whether processes of attraction and differentiation have taken place in the history of this synonym set. The findings suggest that most changes undergone by the adjectives can be understood as processes of attraction whereby one (or more) of the near-synonyms in the set comes to share more semantic ground with the rest. Furthermore, there seems to be an overall process of substitution or replacement, with scented being on the rise in several contexts at the expense of fragrant and, particularly, perfumed.
