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What is it called when certain words are used more frequently and other synonyms (or near synonyms) are used in more restricted situations? What area of linguistics would this fall under?

I find the rise and fall of usage of words interesting. Outside of syntax it seems to be a primary culprit for making something feel stilted, belonging to a specific register, or feeling archaic. I found a high rate of "misuse" among the Germans I know. I personally don't mind sesquipedalian word choice but its occurance among L2+ speakers is interesting. What causes this? Is it a lack of knowledge/experience with what word is in common usage? Is it just a trend among language learners to jump for the fancy words? Or is it possibly an attempt to use cognates of familiar native words that end up being far less common in the new language?

Are there any works that track these kinds of changes? I would, for example, love to have some sort of book/file that lists which words were in vogue in England circa 1300s. Obviously one could just read literature of the era but it seems the kind of thing that could be studied.

Přemysl wrote:Is it a lack of knowledge/experience with what word is in common usage?

This is certainly a factor. If you don't know all the alternatives, you're likely to use the wrong one. I've done it a few times in Japanese.

Bob Johnson wrote:

Přemysl wrote:Is it a lack of knowledge/experience with what word is in common usage?

This is certainly a factor. If you don't know all the alternatives, you're likely to use the wrong one. I've done it a few times in Japanese.

Yeah, bad dictionaries are also to blame.

Bad dictionary usage too.

Are there dictionaries that somehow mark which words are more common? My only thought would be the order in which they are listed.

The New Lakota Dictionary marks the 1000 most common words with one symbol and the 2000 next most common with another. So if the English section has several Lakota synonyms for a single English word you can check which symbol each synonym has and see which synonym is a more common word. Also it has lots of "Usage: blablabla" bits and notes if a word is archaic or obsolete.

Přemysl wrote:Are there dictionaries that somehow mark which words are more common? My only thought would be the order in which they are listed.

j-e puts (P) on the popular words.

Wikt uses frequency lists.

I'm afraid there's no good answer here.

Přemysl wrote:I found a high rate of "misuse" among the Germans I know. I personally don't mind sesquipedalian word choice but its occurance among L2+ speakers is interesting. What causes this? Is it a lack of knowledge/experience with what word is in common usage? Is it just a trend among language learners to jump for the fancy words? Or is it possibly an attempt to use cognates of familiar native words that end up being far less common in the new language?

Another factor is that textbooks for L2+ learners tend to teach a slightly more formal register than what is actually used in colloquial speech. And those colloquial words and constructions that are included in a textbook tend to be a few years out of date, which is made worse by both (a) that most L2+ (textbook) learners build up a major portion of their vocabulary a few years before they actually use it much (so their vocabulary gets even more dated), and (b) that many L2+ speakers don't have regular contact with L1 speakers (so their intuition about usage is not updated to current trends or expanded to cover all kinds of situations).

cedh audmanh wrote:Another factor is that textbooks for L2+ learners tend to teach a slightly more formal register than what is actually used in colloquial speech. And those colloquial words and constructions that are included in a textbook tend to be a few years out of date, which is made worse by both (a) that most L2+ (textbook) learners build up a major portion of their vocabulary a few years before they actually use it much (so their vocabulary gets even more dated), and (b) that many L2+ speakers don't have regular contact with L1 speakers (so their intuition about usage is not updated to current trends or expanded to cover all kinds of situations).

There's also an issue of polycentricity. I've long been struck by how much variance there is between the colloquial registers of British and American English, even leaving aside the issue of slang as such. The usual adjective for "unwell" in AmE is "sick"; in BrE, this generally means "nauseated" and the more usual word is "ill". (For the British meaning of "sick", an American would generally say "sick to my stomach" or use a complete different expression such as "I feel like I'm going to throw up".) Any competent AmE will recognise "ill", but "Are you ill?" would sound horribly stilted to me if I weren't familiar with British usage.

It's not unusual for students of a foreign language to begin with a text which focusses on one particular variant and then switch to one which teaches another. So they end up learning multiple synonyms with no real feel for regional preferences until they've spent some time with speakers from different places.

Some of the electronic dictionaries my students use are simply terrible. They just rattle off a series of words that just about cover the same semantic space ... you'd think they'd put the most common words first, but sometimes they don't.

One of my Korean students was doing a presentation on her home town and she wanted to say there are many "ancient historical sites", but instead she said there are many "localities about Korea special history which are of considerable antiquity".