Abstract

This essay is part of a broader research project that focuses on 19th-century conversation guides, in particular bilingual Portuguese-Italian and polyglot guides that include Portuguese and Italian. The project aims to investigate the role that conversation guides played in the history of foreign language teaching and learning, as well as the mediated relations between their contents and the economic and social ideologies of the time. In a previous article (Lupetti and Guidi 2019) we reconstructed the editorial circumstances, author profiles and macrostructures of the main conversation guides belonging to our corpus. In the present contribution, we propose a first qualitative and quantitative investigation of the main lexical fields around which the vocabularies, phrases and dialogues contained in the guides unfold, with the final aim of assessing the presence within them and the weight assumed by special languages, and in particular by the economic language.