LIPS: Creating a Learner Corpus

The chapter presents and discusses the creation of the spoken corpus LIPS (Lexicon of Spoken Italian by Foreigners). The corpus is based on proficiency exams in Italian as L2 taken at the University for Foreigners of Siena (Università per Stranieri di Siena), and created mainly to enable studies in L2 Italian vocabulary acquisition. The corpus is also organized in a way that facilitates comparisons with the equivalent native speaker corpora. Methodological choices related to transcription norms, lemmatization and part-of-speeh tagging are discussed and motivated. Methods of analysis of native and non-native speakers' lexical richness are discussed as well.