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Michael Bilynsky
Lviv National University, Ukraine
Email: bislo at ukrpost dot ua
Permutation lies in the positional interchange of constituents within a larger set. By definition it seems quite applicable to the study of synonymy over time. The introduction of computerized frameworks into historical lexicology is capable of enhancing the apparent heuristic potential of this tool of diachronic research.
An historical thesaurus of English verbs and deverbal coinages is a construed lexicographic object merging the principles of chronological and onomasiological presentation of the lexical material. Studied in the paper are fragments and entire composition of contemporary synonymous strings whose constituents were attested for the first time throughout specified lapses of time in the history of English. Strings of verbs are juxtaposed with those of action, agent and factitive nouns as well as present / past participles and deverbal (modal) adjectives along the lines of the preservation and graded breech of the constituents sequential placement.
The constituents’ permutations within such sequences reveal a descending similarity scale ranging from identical (time-proof) positioning in the present-day and diachronically rearranged strings to cases when the ordinal placement of constituents in both the contemporary and reconstructed versions of the string fails to reveal any coincidences. Special attention has been paid to strings’ length and floating dominants factors in the positional permutations within parent verbs and deverbal coinages.
The extent of constituents’ permutations of present-day strings over time has been also assessed on the basis of the weight factors imputed to the contemporary ordinal positions and their rearrangement in relative chronology.. An even more subtle scale of differences in the respective placement is accessible from the introduction of weight factors based on absolute chronology available from the OED textual prototypes of the string constituents.
The developed framework makes it possible to address the issue of the changing applicability of the OED prototypes to the reconstructed synonymy of the Middle English and Early New English periods. The splitting of the entire corpus into mutually (non)related part bases determined on etymological, chronological or mixed principles proves a new testing ground for diachronic modelling in computational lexicology.
The presentation will be accompanied with the exemplifying and visualizing outcomes of the developed electronic queries to the self-drawn corpus of all the OED attested verbs and their coinages. We intend it to be seen as a resource whose objectives are in line with those of the Historical English Thesaurus.