Lo studio della variazione linguistica in ambito specialistico tramite l’analisi di concgrams. L’esempio del diritto ambientale

In spite of the assumption that lexical variation has no raison d’être in specialised communication, as it is in contrast with the need for unambiguous lexical items and thus represents an obstacle to the flow of communication, linguistic variants in specialised texts, in fact, are very common. The double starting points of the present paper are, on the one hand, the striking frequency of this phenomenon, as evidenced by the numerous occurrences in specialised corpora as well as by the synonymous variants stored in terminological databases (for example http://iate.europa.eu), and, on the other, the research potential offered by recent computer-based technologies. In particular, the development of new corpus-linguistic tools such as ConcGrams has opened new horizons in the study of inter and intralinguistic variation, as will be discussed with reference to a corpus composed mainly of German and Italian texts concerning environmental legislation