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The students will gain an insight into the practice of creating a bilingual collocations dictionary and the problems that can be encountered in doing so. They will learn which resources and tools can be applied to find the meanings of Italian collocations and to translate them into German (e.g. existing monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, electronic corpora, etc.). By actively participating in the completion of dictionary entries, they will be made aware of lexical peculiarities of Italian and of interlingual differences between Italian and German, and will ideally improve their own language skills and expand their vocabulary.

In recent years, so-called collocations have become increasingly important in foreign language didactics on the one hand, but also in monolingual and bilingual lexicography on the other. Collocations are typical, semi-fixed word combinations of a language, as in Italian e.g. il bambino gattona ('the baby crawls', lit. "the baby moves catlike"), lo zucchero filato ('cotton candy', lit. "spinned sugar"), cementare l'amicizia ('to cement a friendship') and fulminare qcn. con lo sguardo ('to glare at someone', lit. "to thunder someone with one’s look"). As far as Italian lexicography is concerned, in the last decade the first monolingual collocations dictionaries have been published, i.e. the Dizionario delle combinazioni lessicali (Urzì 2009), the Dizionario delle collocazioni (Tiberii 2009), the Dizionario combinatorio compatto italiano (Lo Cascio 2012) and the Dizionario combinatorio italiano (2 vols.; Lo Cascio 2013). However, a bilingual Italian-German collocations dictionary dedicated specifically to collocations does not yet exist and has been in progress at the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Innsbruck for several years (project by C. Konecny and E. Autelli, see www.kollokation.at). The dictionary is based on over 1,000 nouns from the basic Italian vocabulary, whose typical collocations are collected, assigned to different morpho-syntactic categories and translated into German. In joint workshops and group work the students will contribute to the completion of entries of the dictionary, which is currently being worked on. Among other things, the students will be able to find possible German equivalents and search for suitable example sentences for selected collocations using authentic sources.

The course has primarily a workshop and "learning-by-doing" character. After a short theoretical introduction, there will probably be mainly group work, with the members of the individual teams working together on selected entries and complementing each other. If students of Italian mother tongue participate, ideally bilingual groups should be formed so that the participants can contribute with their respective mother tongues in the best possible way.

For the final grade, the workload (total number of hours worked, to be documented regularly), the quality of the results of the group work, the active participation during the course and within the groups, and – if necessary – a reflection to be written at the end are important.

Language level B1 (Italian)

The course language will be Italian, but if desired, parts of the course can also be held in German or, due to the workshop character of the course, it is possible to switch between the languages.