On lexical relations among synonymous adjectives (a corpus-driven research)

The doctoral thesis concems the research of lexical relations among a sampie of German adjectives, which are called "near-synonyms". Partly, the thesis deals also with other paradigmatic relations. The author considers the traditional approach to the semantic relations, which is modified by means of the corpus analysis of four German adjective synonymous pairs (kalt/kühl, schön/hübsch, nett/angenehm, unschön/hässlich). The author has suggested a methodology which makes use of corpus-linguistic tools developed by the Department of Corpus Linguistics at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany (IDS Mannheim) and which can be used with some modifications for the research of other synonymous pairs. The corpus-linguistic tools explore especially similar collocation profiles of the analyzed words and the use of semantically elose words in certain contexts. The results of the analyses are documented on texts deriving from the corpus DEREKo (Mannheim German Reference Corpus). The analyses undertaken in this thesis contribute to illustration of semantic relations in language and help to build up a new, usage-based view of language