Towards a Corpus-Driven Bilingual Italian-English Dictionary of Collocations

The way lexical items combine with each other to form natural-sounding chunks is highly specific to every language and is part of native-speaker competence. For learners of English, however, collocations remain a very thorny issue. Due to the anisomorphism of the Italian and English languages, the majority of collocations cannot undergo a verbatim translation, and yet equivalences are needed, if learners are to understand fully what collocations to use and how to deploy them. Being culture-bound items, collocations should thus appear systematically in bilingual dictionaries, especially as there is evidence that learners still tend to prefer to consult bilingual tools rather than monolingual ones. And yet, research has shown that Italian-English bilingual lexicographical resources poorly document this phenomenon both from a quantitative and a qualitative point of view. This may be partly owing to the fact that corpus linguistics has not influenced bilingual lexicography as it has done monolingual dictionary-making. In the absence of a specifically-designed tool of this sort, then, the first aim of this paper is to present the theoretical aspects, problems and practical motivations for compiling a corpus-based bilingual Italian-English dictionary of collocations targeted at Italian students. The second aim is to start collecting the material to include in it. This will consist of verb + noun collocations in a bidirectional perspective. The third aim is to ponder the methodology to pursue in the compilation of this dictionary, and to present a sample page from it.