ANALISI CRITICA DEL DISCORSO LESSICOGRAFICO CINESE: UNO STUDIO DIACRONICO DELLO XIANDAI HANYU CIDIAN 现代汉语词典

This dissertation proposes a study, from a critical and diachronic perspective, of the Xiandai hanyu cidian 现代汉语词典 (hereinafter XHC), a monolingual dictionary of standard modern Chinese (putonghua 普通话) which plays a central role within the lexicographical field of the People’s Republic of China. The compilation of the dictionary is entrusted to the Institute of Linguistics belonging to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and, since its foundation in 1977, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which are both research institutions placed under direct control of the State Council. Officially published for the first time in 1978, and now in its seventh edition (2016), the XHC was conceived by the political leadership as a tool for promoting the standardisation and the popularisation of the common language, within the broader project for language reform in the 1950s. This research adopts the theoretical framework of critical lexicography, and it is based on the premise that a dictionary can be analysed as a form of discourse and, specifically, as a form of lexicographical discourse, which is also to be understood as being historically specific (Benson 2001). According to this perspective, the contents of language dictionaries and, therefore, their lexicographical discourse, should be considered in relation to the extra-textual reality where their compilation and their fruition take place. They can be seen both as products of their extra-textual reality and as tools playing an active role in the reception, construction, and consolidation, as well as in the dissemination of those meanings that are considered as correct and acceptable by the dominant ideology (Fairclough 1989; Fishman 1995; Hornscheidt 2008, Rodríguez Barcia 2012). The objective of the analysis is to verify whether and to what extent the lexicographical discourse constructed by the XHC reflects and interacts with its extra-textual, ideological, and, therefore, political and social context. The research intends to fill a gap in the critical literature on this dictionary, in which the studies investigating the relationship between lexicographical discourse and ideological elements are, at the present day, still very limited (Lee 2014; Hu H., Hai X. and Hao J. 2019). This dissertation is divided into two main parts: the first consists of the first, the second and the third chapters and the second includes the fourth and the fifth chapters. The first chapter centres upon the definition of the theoretical framework of the study and, specifically, on the relationship between language and ideology, as well as between lexicography and ideology. The second chapter aims firstly at reconstructing the history of the XHC and, subsequently, describing its formal and lexicographical features. The third chapter is dedicated to an evaluation of the state of the art of the research on the dictionary. The fourth chapter presents the methodology constructed and followed for the selection of the dictionary entries taken into analysis. The selection has been carried out through the use of the software AntConc for the analysis of a corpus specifically built for this study. This corpus comprises reports on the work of the government, usually presented to the National People’s Congress by the Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of China, and reports presented by political leaders to the National Congress of the Chinese Communist party (1964-2017). The analysis and the selection of the words (and, therefore, of the dictionary entries) from the political corpus was guided by the definition of both qualitative criteria (morphological and semantic features) and quantitative criteria (number of occurrences). Finally, the fifth chapter is devoted to the analysis, in a critical, ideological, and diachronic perspective, of the definitions of the selected entries, which were collected through the consultation of successive editions of the XHC. More precisely, the case study examines all the editions of the dictionary, from the first to the seventh (1978, 1983, 1996, 2002, 2005, 2012, 2016), together with the so-called ‘trial edition’ (shiyongben 试用本), printed in 1973, and the ‘supplement edition’ (bubian 补编) published in 1989. A specific section is dedicated to each entry, discussing both the nature of the definitions, including the lexicographical examples, and their evolution in a diachronic perspective, thus evaluating the ways in which the definitions construct the meaning of each entry in relation to the ideological, political, and social context of the dictionary. The final part of the dissertation provides some concluding remarks that retrace the results of the critical analysis. The closing section mainly discusses how the lexicographical discourse defined by the selected entries of the XHC interacts with its context of compilation and the degree to which it reflects the official formulations and meanings of the Chinese leadership regarding some specific concepts. Finally, a broader discussion about the critical approach adopted for this research will also be offered.