Ghost words and new discoveries in the TLIO Old Italian dictionary

The editorial staff of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) in Florence find themselves in a unique position. The Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO)(in progress), on which they have been working since 1997, is based on a textual database of mainly 13th and 14th century texts. Their objective approach to this data means that discoveries of unknown words or usages are a frequent phenomenon, bringing to light structures and lexemes which earlier generations of Italian lexicographers - who tended to privilege the Tuscan literary tradition - would have considered strange or erroneous. However, the fact that the database software puts all lexical items on the same level also creates its own set of difficulties, as the task of discerning actual elements of Old Italian from 'ghost' words or scribal errors falls squarely on the shoulders of the lexicographers. Of the 1,978 texts, containing 22 million occurrences, which today constitute the TLIO Corpus, 190 texts (almost eight million occurrences, more than a third of the total) are actually translations from other languages: mainly Latin, but also French and (rarely) Occitan and Castilian. For these translations the main problem lies in ascertaining the status of certain unfamiliar words and structures: are they occasional adaptations, errors or actual features of Old Italian usage? In this paper I would like to discuss a number of cases in which the combined lexicographical and philological approach of the OVI researchers to the texts in the TLIO Corpus have yielded new knowledge, bringing to the light real but hitherto unrecognized lexemes and contructions