Telling stories. The use of proper names in Florence guidebooks

This paper, as part of a wider research project – Il Lessico dei Beni Culturali di Firenze including the creation of comparative databases in seven languages – analyses the use of proper names (PNs) in a corpus of contemporary guidebooks of Florence. The purpose of the research is to provide translators with linguistic and cultural information through the use of key proper names and their recurring clusters/phraseology. There is a plethora of contrasting views on PNs. Pierini (2008) argues that PNs constitute a system organised according to criteria varying across cultures while they provide an interpretation of the society of which they are the expression. They are linguistic items fulfilling a referential function, that is, they refer to single entities existing in the real world (Lyons 1977). Like deictics, they enable a primary identification of their referents; but, unlike deictics, they are not dependent on the immediate situational context, according to Molino (1982), Lyons (1977) and Van Langendonck (2007). Like nouns, Pierini (2008) states, PNs constitute an open class of words and, hence, are lexical rather than grammatical but, unlike nouns, they lack lexical meaning. Moreover, PNs form a class of linguistic items sharing features with both nouns and deictics. Formally, PNs share some grammatical features with common nouns, but differ from them in various respects. Both PNs and deictics lack lexical meaning and have a referential function; but, while the interpretation of deictics depends on the situational context, the interpretation of PNs depends on the linguistic context and encyclopaedic knowledge (Pierini 2008). In discussing PNs, Searle (1958) underlines that they do not specify any characteristics, they convey no meaning, they are non-connotative, since “they function not as descriptions, but as pegs on which to hang descriptions” (Searle 1958,172). In other words, they are affixed to one object not to convey any fact about it, but to enable you to speak about it. Rey-Debove (1976) claims that proper nouns are non-coded interlinguistic words whose referential sense is unknown. Nonetheless, they have a meaning which is limited to their autonymic connotator. A proper noun is thus a noun that connotes its own sign. By contrast, Farina (forthcoming) argues that although proper nouns have “no sense”, they can be defined like common nouns by the use of hypernyms at the beginning of their definition and are not devoid of synonymic relations with abbreviations, clippings, acronyms of proper nouns, or noun associations under the form of clusters (Samson forthcoming). Clusters, defined by Biber et al., (2004) as lexical bundles, are words which are found repeatedly together in each others' company, in a sequence forming phrases (Scott 2010). Clusters are based on the assumption that words are not to be seen as elements in isolation that can be slotted into syntactic frameworks, but as forming larger units or, as Sinclair (1996) terms them, as extended units of meaning. Since the meaning of words lies in their use and use cannot exist in isolation, use can only be recognised and analysed contextually and functionally, as Firth (1957) points out. Consequently, language is to be seen as the vector of continuous repetitions in the social process, that is, people linguistically act systematically; their lexical patterns entail patterns of meaning and every distinct sense of a word is associated with a distinction in form. In other words, form and meaning are inseparable (Sinclair 2004). Williams (2012) views clusters as statistically based chains of collocations which form recurrent phraseology which are unique to any one sublanguage and serve to define the frames of reference within that sublanguage. Moreover, recurring clusters/phraseology enable the translator to not only look at the immediate environment of a search word, but also to link it outwards to the wider meaning context. This enables to isolate lexical units in the Sinclairian sense and foreground the connotations which give sense to nouns in a particular culture. Contextual meaning is therefore vital as, on the one hand, a surface analysis can hide important connotative features of proper names. On the other hand, different situational contexts, specialised languages develop clusters/phraseology which are unique to that environment, in this case a corpus of Florence guidebooks. Guidebooks have mainly been analysed by focussing on people’s narratives related to their travels and experiences, on the verbal description of space and identity of heritage sites, or the popularisation of museums on the Internet (Samson 2012; 2011). By contrast, this paper, by adopting a mixed methodology investigates the use of proper names and their recurring clusters/phraseology in a corpus of Florence guidebooks as part of a comparable multilingual database for dictionaries.