The ICoN Corpus of Academic Written Italian (L1 and L2)

This paper describes the ICoN corpus, a corpus of academic written Italian, some of the directions of research it could open, and some of the first outcomes of research conducted on it. The ICoN corpus includes 2,115,000 tokens written by students having Italian as L2 students (level B2 or higher) and 1,769,000 tokens written by students having Italian as L1; this makes it the largest corpus of its kind. The texts included in the corpus come from the online examinations taken by 787 different students for the ICoN Degree Program in Italian Language and Culture for foreign students and Italian citizens residing abroad. The texts were produced by students having 41 different L1s, and 18 different L1s are represented in the corpus by more than 20,000 tokens. The corpus is encoded in XML files; it can be freely queried online and it is available upon request for research purposes. The paper includes the discussion of preliminary research in the field of collocations, showing that, in the texts included in the corpus, while learners and natives do use multiword expressions in a similar way, learners can overuse relatively infrequent forms of multiword adverbials, or use some adverbials in a non-standard way.