Prendere il toro per le corna o lasciare una bocca amara? – The Treatment of Tripartite Italian Idioms in Monolingual Italian and Bilingual Italian-English Dictionaries

This paper undertakes an empirical investigation into the treatment of tripartite Italian idioms in selected monolingual Italian and bilingual Italian-English dictionaries. Tripartite idioms are phrasal constructs typically arranged into one of the three following syntactic forms: V+N+N, V+ADJ+N or V+N+ADJ. From an organisational viewpoint, these idioms are somewhat more problematic for lexicographers due to the presence of a third lexical constituent. Current lexicographical practice adopts a largely subjective approach to dealing with idioms, which for the most part are V+N forms, therefore those with a wider syntactic form require more considered decision making when determining their point(s) of entry in a dictionary. Certain tripartite idioms also collapse into binomial (N+N) or nominal-adjectival forms (ADJ+N/N+ADJ), thus placing a question mark over the necessity to record their verb element or not. Together, these issues contribute to making tripartite idioms one of the most acutely difficult phrasal categories for lexicographers. This paper examines the entry points of 100 tripartite Italian idioms in selected monolingual Italian and bilingual Italian-English dictionaries published within the last decade. Firstly, it discusses relevant theoretical viewpoints relating to the lemmatisation of idioms over the last 30 years. Thereafter, it focuses on the notion of an idiom as a lexicographical entry in consideration of its varied intrinsic features and how these are productive in selecting an appropriate entry point. The presentation of the empirical data in the following section is stratified according to the publishing house of the analysed dictionaries and gives a comparative discussion on their respective approaches to dealing with tripartite idioms. Finally, the last section unifies the theoretical arguments and practical approaches and proposes a theoretical framework model for lemmatising tripartite idioms to offer a more coherent and consistent platform for their organisation in monolingual Italian and bilingual Italian-English dictionaries.