“Voci che frequentemente cascano di bocca nel discorso familiare” : vocabularies and wordlists in 18th-century English grammar books for Italian learners

This paper analyses the vocabulary chapters of five 18th-century English grammar books addressed to Italian learners – Pleunus (1701), Altieri (1728), Baretti (1762), Barker (1766), Dalmazzoni (1788) – which were mainly assembled from Anglo-French and English source texts and compiled either out of practical (trade and business) or cultural necessity. The
investigation, mostly lexicographical, highlights the wordlists’ semantic arrangement, which in part conforms to the onomasiological tradition of previous centuries. The lexicological strategies employed to provide suitable semantic equivalents generally rely upon glosses and synonyms, along with some usage labels and cultural references in a few texts. Wavering between bidirectionality (i.e. English and Italian target readers) and unidirectionality (i.e. Italian target readers only), they testify to a gradual trend inversion in Anglo-Italian power relations.