A corpus-based case study of differences in meaningand usage of two near-synonyms. American awesome vs. British wicked

Sammanfattning: “Near-synonymy is the study of semantic relations between lexemes or constructions that possess a similar usage” (Glynn 2010: 2; Lyons 1995:60; Divjak 2006:21). In this study two near-synonyms awesome and wicked are to be looked more closely at. Near-synonyms have similar meanings but they do not mean exactly the same. The aim of the study is to try to locate whether such small differences in meaning and usage of the two lexemes are present, and if they are what these differences might be.