Resumen de Designing a Learner’s Dictionary Based on Sinclair’s Lexical Units by Means of Corpus Pattern Analysis and the Sketch Engine

Paolo Vito Dimuccio Failla, Laura Giacomini

• This paper is part of a study for the design of an advanced learner’s dictionary (in Italian) aimed at implementing Sinclair's vision of ‘the ultimate dictionary’ (see Sinclair et al., 2004: xxiv) and based on his conception of lexical units. Our present goal is to exhaustively portray the meaning profile of verbs, systematically distinguishing their meanings by their normal patterns of usage. To achieve this, we apply Hanks’s Corpus Pattern Analysis by means of Kilgarriff and Rychlý's Sketch Engine.

  The first chapter presents and discusses the theoretical background to our work. The second gives a description of our methodology, which is then exemplified by a case study of the Italian verb seguire. The final part of the paper draws a few conclusions on the feasibility and usefulness of Sinclair's ‘ultimate dictionary’ and hints at future steps of the dictionary-making process.

  The dictionary project is in its design stage and is intended to be a platform for cooperation between the Italian publisher Zanichelli and a network of international universities and research institutes.