La variazione semasiologica di sottocodice: un esempio di analisi lessicale corpus-based

Abstract

This paper aims to illustrate how corpus linguistics tecniques allow to study the sociolinguistic phenomenon of semasiological variation. Semasiological variation can be described as that kind of lexical variation that implies the presence of two or more semantic meaning-variants for a single form, where the variation between semantic structures can correlate with the variation of social variables. Adopting a prototypically structured model of lexical meaning and using collocation analysis as a means to provide a representation of the usage features exhibited by a lemma in a corpus, assumed as a representative sample of a given sociolinguistic variety, it becomes possible to characterize the different semantic configurations displayed by a lexeme in different language varieties. Four case-studies of Italian lexemes illustrate a possible implementation of this kind of methodology with regards to the sociolinguistic dimension of field variation, using data extracted from the RIDIRE web-corpus.