An onomasiological dictionary of collocations: mediostructural properties and search procedures

This paper describes a corpus-based case study aimed at modelling an electronic dictionary of Italian collocations addressed to professional translators. The study focuses on a small number of lexical items belonging to the semantic field paura (fear/fright/worry) and investigates the advantages of an onomasiological arrangement of collocations as well as the organization of dictionary data around a lexical prototype. The intended lexicographic representation, whose function is to support textual production and language skills improvement, rest upon a coherent and solid cross-reference network. The paper pays close attention to this lexicographic mediostructure, which provides the user with exhaustive but also selective information about collocational data. Adapted from the source document