«Parlato e dizionari. Il trattamento degli usi parlati nel GRADIT»

The aim of this work is to make a detailed analysis of the ways used by the Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso (abbreviated GRADIT, 1999 – about 250.000 entries) to point out, through more or less standardized labels, the typical linguistic uses of spoken language. A representative dictionary of a language has to give an exhaustive account both of the written and the spoken uses of a language. Current use’s dictionaries usually follow three main strategies to deal with spoken usages: a) particular labels: b) colloquial phrases, such as in spoken, in spoken language, etc.; c) a specific phraseology. With regard to particular labels, dictionaries exhibit a scarcely homogeneous behavior, having recourse both to labels that are typical of the diaphasic variation (such as colloquial, familiar, jocular, ironic, pejorative, vulgar) and to labels that belong to the diastratic variation, but refer to words and phrases that are typical of the substandard uses of language (such as jargon, popular, etc.). In our research we have found that about 2% of the entries (both monosemic and polysemic) exhibit labels that are typical of spoken language. These entries have also been analysed considering (a) their usage frequency in the lexicon, (b) the parts of speech more involved in spoken usages, (c) the most frequent word formation strategies (considering substantives, adjectives and verbs) and finally (d) the most representative semantic fields to which these entries belong.