On the interconnection between language and society: Industrialization as a driving force for semantic change in the semantic domain of smell
doi: https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.53.1.9
Keywords:
semantic change; social change; corpus linguistics; collocation; domain of smellAbstract
This contribution provides a hypothesis to account for semantic change undergone by adjectives designating the concept pleasant smelling in American English, which have come to increasingly denote artificial smells at the expense of natural ones. It is postulated that social and technological developments which occurred in American society during the First and Second Industrial Revolutions might well have steered the semantic fluctuations undergone by the concept. To test this hypothesis, methods used in recent research on the interplay between social and linguistic change are resorted to. In particular, a dictionary-based approach is first adopted, the results of which are then complemented by a more data-driven approach that investigates the conceptualization of a series of semantic domains that might reflect the aforementioned extralinguistic developments. Results offer support to the claim that the semantic change undergone by adjectives from the domain of smell has in all likelihood been influenced by the societal developments taking place in the United States in the period examined. This general move towards more artificiality can therefore not be coincidental, but must be the result of some underlying motivation steering change.
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