Daniela Pettersson-Traba receives AELINCO’s (Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics) 2023 Book Award ‘Aquilino Sánchez’ for Early Career Researchers

We are delighted to announce that Daniela Pettersson-Traba, a member of VLCG, has received  AELINCO’s (Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics) 2023 Award ‘Aquilino Sánchez’ for Early Career Researchers for her monograph The development of the concept of SMELL in American English: A usage-based view of near-synonymy (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2022; 267 pp.).

Daniela’s study examines five adjectival near-synonyms in the history of American English from the understudied semantic domain of SMELL: fragrant, perfumed, scented, sweet-scented, and sweet-smelling. Their distribution is analyzed across a wide range of contexts, including semantic, morphosyntactic, and stylistic ones, since distributional patterns of this type serve as a proxy for semantic (dis)similarity. The data is submitted to various univariate and multivariate statistical techniques, making it possible to uncover fine-grained (dis)similarities among the near-synonyms, as well as possible changes in their prototypical structures. Her book sheds valuable light on the diachronic development of lexical near-synonyms, a dimension that has up to now been relatively disregarded.

Congratulations!

By teresa in News, Uncategorized on May 23, 2023