Life beyond dictionaries

MOVING BETWEEN WORDS: KEYWORDS AND PHRASEOLOGICAL NETWORKS IN (ENGLISH) GUIDEBOOKS OF FLORENCEThere is a limited number of studies that have guidebooks astheir research focus. This can be divided into two broad themes. Thefirst is devoted to the history of guidebooks (Koshar, 2000) which isconsidered a source of insight into the larger theme of the history of tourism (Bruner, 2004; Buzard, 1993), the usage of guidebooks bytourists (Therkelsen, Sorensen, 2005), the relationship betweentourists and the guidebooks used, or people’s narratives about theirtravel and tourism experiences (Beck, 2006). The second themefocuses on guidebooks from a genre perspective (Denti, 2012; Fodde,Denti, 2005), on their textual and visual content (Bhattacharyya,1997), on the verbal description of space and identity in heritage sites(Samson, 2011), or on the popularization of guides to museums on theInternet (Samson, 2012). By contrast, not much attention has beendedicated to the study of common and proper names related to thedescription of monuments in guidebooks of Florence in English. This paper, therefore, as part of a wider research project –Il Lessico dei Beni Culturali di Firenze which includes the creation oftwo comparative databases in seven languages – will analyse howFlorentine monuments are described in a corpus of contemporaryguidebooks. The lexicographical model adopted is based on the culturalaspect of the project. That is, the latter has determined the choice tofocus on common and proper names which shed light on the culturaland historical connotations of the words used to describe Florence.Furthermore, since the main users targeted by the project aretranslators, the purpose of the lexicographical items is not only toprovide the required linguistic information but also to indicate themost appropriate translation choices by including repeated clusters.That is words which are found repeatedly together in each others'company, in sequences forming phraseology emerging from existingtranslations of the same topic. Clusters represent a tighter relationshipthan collocates (Scott, McEnery, 2006).Phraseology implies the Firthian (1957) concept that words arenot to be seen as elements in isolation that can be slotted into syntacticframeworks, but as forming larger units, or as J. M. Sinclair (1996;2004) terms them as extended units of meaning. Since the meaning ofwords lies in their use and use cannot exist in isolation, use can onlybe recognized and analysed contextually and functionally. A keyconcept linked to extended units of meaning is that language is to beseen as the vector of continuous repetitions in the social processFirth, 1957). In other words, people linguistically act systematically;their lexical patterns entail patterns of meaning and every distinctsense of a word is associated with a distinction in form, that is, formand meaning are inseparable (Sinclair, 2004). Textual meaning, thus,can be indicated by collocations (Firth, 1957), that is, the mere wordaccompaniment, the other word-material in which they are mostcommonly or most characteristically embedded. Collocations aretherefore not fixed elements but the product of the dynamic process oflanguage production, becoming gradually institunationalised throughusage in a given language environment. This entails that differentsituational contexts, specialised languages or specific genres developcollocations which are unique to that environment (Williams, 2001). Thus, drawing on J. M. Sinclair (1991) and G. Williams (2000),the method adopted in this study is a contextualist one which applies acorpus linguistic approach, specifically a corpus-driven analysis. Thisallows to achieve evidence from the corpus itself by statisticaltechniques attained through the use of computers and the applicationof a computer software suite. Moreover, the approach looks at thelexical items from the viewpoint of word association. This study, therefore, by focusing on the common and propernames forming keywords and their clusters/phraseological networkswhich are used to describe and define the internal and external spaceof the main Florentine monuments, and the artworks represented inthem, included in the corpus, attempts to provide extensiveinformation to translators. The emerging data is interpretedqualitatively.