Multifunctional che, cleft sentences and presentational c’è in corpora of spoken Italian

Patrizia Giampieri

doi:10.18778/1731-7533.23.11

Authors

Patrizia Giampieri University of Perugia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1731-7533.23.11

Keywords:

neo-standard Italian, corpus analysis, spoken language, the grammar of spoken Italian, spoken Italian corpora

Abstract

This paper is aimed at exploring some traits of neo-standard Italian in four different spoken corpora, such as children’s conversations, adult conversations, parliamentary debates, and film subtitles. The following features are investigated: multifunctional che, cleft sentences, and presentational c’è. Building on scholarly examples and sample phrases containing the traits above mentioned, this paper discusses how to search for, retrieve and analyse neo-standard phrasemes in the four corpora. Other features are also presented and investigated on a case-by-case basis. In addition, relative frequencies of phraseme occurrences are noticed and discussed. In this way, a qualitative and a small-scale quantitative comparative approach is developed. The paper findings report that all the traits appear in the corpora with some notable genre-related differences.

Author Biography

Patrizia Giampieri, University of Perugia

Patrizia Giampieri, MSc, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Perugia (Italy). She is a member of the Executive Board of EST (European Society for Translation Studies). She has authored books and academic papers on English as a second language, legal English, corpus-based translation, machine translation, AI-driven translation, and spoken language.

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