Lessicografia, filologia e «corpora» digitali: qualche considerazione dalla parte dell'OVI

This paper aims at showing how today's databases could change the traditional relationship existing between Philology and historical Lexicography, with specific reference to Old Italian lexicography and OVI dictionary (TLIO) and databases. Through the analysis of some Old Italian words meaning 'beginning' ((in)cominciamento, (in)comincianza, inizio), this paper presents a new philological method to manage the Corpus OVI extensive documentation: while traditional historical lexicography operates by identifying ancient occurrences of a particular word and, on this ground, by interpreting and defining their meaning, the "new" corpus-based (or, more likely, corpus-driven) historical lexicography can go further, placing that word inside the structure of ancient lexicon, that is, inferring from the documentation the distribution and the (possible) specificity of the lexeme. Relying on a study carried out by Cosimo Burgassi and by myself, this paper introduces some new interpretative categories targeting the study of words' (in the case in point, Romance words') history, such as "Rate of Connotation" ('quoziente connotativo') and "latent Latinism" ('latinismo latente').