Terminology

Most of the terms used in this introduction should be self-explanatory We have tried to lay out the aims, design and scope of our work as clearly and simply as possible and where we have used technical terms whose meanings may not be immediately obvious, we have sought to explain them as and when they occur. We have generally referred to the terms that appear in the body of this dictionary as ‘lexical items’ rather than ‘words’. We have not done this for the sake of using a technical term but because a certain number of our frame titles and head-words (see Section 5 below) are not single words but phrases consisting of more than just one word. For example, under the entry bisognare it would be accurate to refer to occorrere as a ‘word’, but it would not be accurate to refer to avere bisogno di as a ‘word’, since it is a group of words or a phrase. The term ‘lexical item’ usefully covers both such cases.

Synonyms

What is a synonym? In general terms it can be said to be one lexical item with approximately the same meaning as another one. But in looking closely at any individual lexical item, the question arises: how much the ‘same’ as another one does it have to be in order to be a synonym? While few would dispute that stesso and medesimo are sufficiently the same to be synonyms, is analogo also a synonym of those words?