Context-dependent Variation of LSP Collocations: A Corpus-based Analysis

This paper concerns a corpus-based study on LSP collocational variation, a phenomenon that is largely underrepresented in bilingual LSP lexicographic resources. Terminological variation on the formal (i.e. paradigmatic/syntagmatic) and semantic level is analysed in texts belonging to the technical domain (building and energy subfield). With the help of a balanced monolingual LSP corpus, variation is observed as a context-dependent phenomenon, with context interpreted as the combination of topic, genre-specific and communicative functions related to the LSP vertical dimension. A model entry from an English-Italian technical dictionary shows how the treatment of LSP collocations as autonomous terms and a corpus-based description of their variational behaviour can provide users with a means for efficiently tackling text production tasks, both in the native and in the foreign language.