CONSISTENCY
OF SALESIAN TERMINOLOGY
A corpus-based case study
of settore and dicastero
WHAT
IS A CORPUS AND WHAT DOES IT DO?
In recent years, corpus linguistics has come to the
fore as one means of determining the consistency of an organisation’s
terminology. A corpus is a
representative collection of the language in use by the entity concerned. The special contribution that a corpus can
make is to indicate regular patterns of words or phrases. These patterns result from collocation of two
or more words. Collocation is a
term in linguistics that indicates the ‘glue’ between certain words, either
because they naturally go together, or because users of the language place them
in connection with one another. This can
be analysed statistically to discover the degree of mutual
information, a statistically derived score, between words.
Often times a corpus will provide information that can
only be known because of these collocational patterns. An example of this kind of thing drawn from
the largest corpus of the English language, the Brown Corpus, now up to 300
million words, is the following contrast:
.. just earned brownie points /.. that’s another brownie point. The corpus tells us that although both
expressions are perfectly grammatical and possible, the overwhelming incidence
in the corpus of the plural brownie points in collocation with the verb earn
indicates which of the two expressions people actually say as distinct from a
made-up phrase that could appear in a dictionary or a grammar book.
SETTORE OR DICASTERO?
The words settore and
dicastero (in English, sector and department)
appear to me to be an example that corpus linguistics can throw light on. We already have a corpus of one million words
from Salesian official texts. This is
sufficiently representative. What does
analysis of the corpus tell us?
The corpus to consider is the Italian one, since this
is the official language for Salesian terminology. If we consider only the Constitutions and
Regulations, the first item of information revealed by the corpus is clear: settore/i appears some 33 times, while dicastero/i does not appear at all! In the case of the former word it collocates
significantly (that is it has a statistically significant Mutual Information
score) with Consigliere/i di…, and there is no doubt from the context (Formazione, Pastorale Giovanile and so forth) that these are the particular
sectors determined by the Constitutions presently adopted to express Salesian life
and mission.
From a purely constitutional point of view then, end
of argument. Reference to these areas
(there are six of them: famiglia salesiana, formazione, pastorale giovanile, missioni, comunicazione sociale, economia) should be
found to collocate significantly with settore/i
or other form such as settoriale/i. But there are more official texts than only
the Constitutions and Regulations. The Acts of the General Council, for example.
In Fr Viganò’s time, and
there are 62 of his letters to the worldwide Salesian Congregation in the
corpus, settore collocates significantly with educazione and with giovani
and rarely with the official sectors named in the C&R. On the other hand, dicastero
collocates significantly with Pastorale Giovanile and Formazione
(and other main areas already named) or Consigliere/i
di… We
cannot make too much of an argument about the use of capitalization to indicate
possible contrasts of usage, since Italian often chooses lower case where
English would choose upper case or capitals. Nevertheless, Dicastero
is more likely to appear as such (capital D) while settore
almost never with capital S.
There is one example in the Viganò corpus where the
two terms appear together (if they could be described as being in contrast with
one another I would call this a terminological minimum pair), in the phrase …programma settoriale affidato al corrispondente dicastero. Perhaps in this case there is not a minimal
pair, but the appearance of the two terms together is something to keep
watching out for – that gives us useful information. Rather than being a ‘minimal pair’ (the term
always indicates contrast), settore and dicastero may belong to what is known as meronymy, or the semantic relations holding between a part
and its whole. In this
case, settore being the whole and dicastero the part.
In the Vecchi corpus there is no significant
collocation of settore with the six areas
(except in the 1996-2002 planning program of the Rector Major and his
Council). We find one example similar to
that just quoted from the Viganò corpus: …programmazione
settoriale dei sei dicasteri. Wherever dicastero/i
appears (only a few times) it refers to one of the six areas.
In the case of Fr Chavez’ letters there is an
increased use of both terms. Settore appears frequently with a range of terms:
educazione, università salesiana, formazione professionale, scuola, tempo libero, parrocchia…Settore/i collocates significantly with the six
areas or with Consiglieri di... But so
does Dicastero. There is a new (just one) example of the two
terms appearing together in what could be a minimal pair, or if not that, in a
reversal of meronymous relationship where dicastero is the whole and settore
a part: …inserimento di
questo settore [IUS] nel Dicastero della Pastorale Giovanile.
BRINGING THE INFORMATION TOGETHER
What do we learn from this information so far? That other than in the official text of the
Constitutions and Regulations, where dicastero
does not appear, the term dicastero has
established itself as a rival to, possibly an equal to, settore
in official reference. It is not
possible to argue that settore is clearly
defined as a term by C. 133 or by R 107.
The latter’s reference to uffici tecnici e consulte could
suggest a dicastero but this is never made
clear. Dicastero is nowhere defined
officially, but the entity it applies to readily becomes apparent through its
Salesian usage: a General Councillor with one or more
teams providing practical assistance in areas of both animation and government.
In fact at this point it is worth making reference to
GC19, 1965. Here, immediately after the
close of Vatican II, the General Chapter embarks on a road that takes the
Congregation right up to our own time (Currently the post GC25 period), namely,
restructuring of administration at world level, with flow-on consequences at
other levels. GC19 began to move away
from the traditional General Council structure (it introduced the term Superior
Council at that stage, moving on from the time-worn Superior Chapter
in place since Don Bosco) and spoke clearly of Superiori
titolari di dicastero. At the time these were nominated as the
Prefect General, the Spiritual Director General and the Economer General, but
three other Councillors also who were titolari di dicastero, and looked after settori
specifici di attività salesiana. It is interesting that the term dicastero did not eventually make it into the
Italian revised C&R.
We learn something more. The term settore
is frequently and consistently applied to a wide range of areas, and a future
General Chapter could certainly determine more or fewer, or different
combinations of) official sectors with a Councillor
at the head as part of the General Council.
It is acknowledged in The Project of Life, commentary on the
Constitutions, that what determines a sector is not works (e.g. schools,
oratories, youth centers…), nor people (e.g. those in formation, Cooperators…)
but aspects of the life and mission of the Congregation. The Regulations already allow for settori
other than those with a Councillor to be
established directly dependent on the Rector Major (R. 108). These can have appropriate segretariati centrali.
It is this natural breadth of application of the term settore which bedevils attempts to narrow it to, for
example, a definition including animazione –
which could then lead to dicastero being
introduced as a means of governo. Had that
distinction somehow been carefully contrived from the beginning it may have
reduced confusion, but neither in the Constitutions nor
elsewhere in official texts is there evidence of strong collocation between settore and animazione. (Collocation beyond five words either side of
the central term, in this case settore, is too
weak to consider). And of course we
learn that Salesians at all levels are happy enough to refer to the area in
question as dicastero in addition to
calling it a settore..
In fact it is at this point that the expression quoted from Fr Chavez
above is illuminating. The settore he refers to shows the term in its wider
use, this time the Institute of Salesian Universities or IUS in its Italian
acronym, and this, he says, is to be inserted in a dicastero (inserimento
in..). That suggests to me that one of
the sectors that fits the description of R. 108 has
now been subordinated to one of the six main areas already determined. It would have been awkward to use settore in both cases and would probably have forced
the employment of capitalization in one case.
It made more sense to say what was said.
Which in the end, is possibly a way forward.
IS THERE ANYTHING THAT SHOULD BE DONE?
This is more than a case of someone who likes to play
with words. What we are dealing with is
a question of consistency in terminology which, over time, begins to have
implications for the Congregation. Let
me offer a case in point.
The Social Communication Sector (to use its proper
designation) of the Congregation has, since GC25, been established in its own
right with its own Councillor. The first and current Councillor
for SC, Fr Scaramussa, has produced an important
document with the help of 30 members of the World Advisory Council for Social
Communication which met in
Amongst other things, this document, in an attempt to
bring together all aspects of Social Communication as it operates within the
Congregation, is careful with its terminology.
The whole is known as the sector (I am using the English
translation at this point, but that translation is equally as careful). The sector makes use of a department -
its offices and services. Within the
sector, however, are areas: animation and formation, production,
business enterprises.
The SSCS tries to avoid setting up independent sectors
(hence its use of the word area).
Formation, production, business ventures are all meant to work in with
the system and every effort is made to avoid setting centrifugal forces to
work.
Solution no. 1: The above seems to me to model an approach
that could be used in other Salesian sectors.
It begins to establish a set of semantic relationships which orders
parts to a whole in a systematic way.
Solution no. 2: Official texts in line with what people
normally say/write and vice versa. If a
future change in the wording of the appropriate Constitutions and Regulations
were to introduce the term dicastero in place
of settore for the ‘top’ level, and make that
term refer to the reality that most people are referring to anyway, namely the Councillor in charge along with whatever team/s he has at
his disposal for both animation and government.
This is another and different approach to the one adopted above by
SSCS. Given the approach of GC19 the
Congregation could have continued along this line anyway. It would not detract from the term settore which can continue to be used as it is
generally, to apply to an area of interest, animation, government
even, but not as a minimal pair with dicastero
as the other term. In this case, the
areas in SSCS could be called sectors, since the latter term
would have returned to its more general meaning. Or we continue with areas. It makes no difference.
I need to mention here that the FMA have thrown a
spanner in the linguistic works by avoiding both settore
and dicastero and opting for ambito! They
are free to do so of course, but I recently attended a joint meeting of the two
groups (for want of a better term) where we as SDB’s
were talking about our settore and dicastero but were also using ambito
in the way Italian normally uses it to describe some broad area of interest,
while the FMA present were using ambito in
their special sense only. It really was
an interesting meeting and meant that people had to be wide awake to follow the
conversation at times!
The present situation appears either to set up a
contrast between two registers of Salesian language and purports to give settore a limited meaning that it resists in
practice, or confusion reigns and people use a range of terms interchangeably. We can surely improve on this.
(There is still a place for segretariati
centrali but that term could be reserved to areas
of importance that come under R. 108, since a Dicastero
is more than a secretariate; it includes the Councillor as well.
This would bring the term in line with the usage in the
English official (Salesian) texts have largely solved
the problem by adopting department (even in the Constitutions) as the key
term. This has freed up the word sector
for its more general use, though there are examples where settore
in our Italian texts has been glossed as sector in English - #112 of
GC25, for example. It is of interest to
note that #112 is precisely about the fact that the youth condition today
‘frequently defies sectorial limitation’.
In the end, the issue needs to be first sorted out in
Italian, then we look at the other languages in their
own right. If we Salesians choose the
way we wish to divide up our reality in the official language first, it then
becomes possible to see how appropriate that division is in another
language. English has instinctively
chosen the second of the two solutions I have proposed above – it has brought
Salesian English, in this case at least, largely into line with what people
actually say. That doesn’t make it the
best solution but it offers an example to be considered.
There are a number of areas besides this one (settore/dicastero/area/ambito..) where there is either inconcsistency in the official texts – the Italian texts,
then – or where the translators have introduced glosses for their own language
that produce strange results. The
question of the consistency in terminology of a multi-nation entity such as the
Salesians of Don Bosco is an issue to be given due consideration in all the
aspects it presents. To achieve such
consistency is not an impossible task, but like so many areas of endeavour, it is also a technical one and calls for the
appropriate skills.
Julian Fox
December 2004