Learner corpus research and phraseology in Italian as a second language: The case of the DICI-A, a learner dictionary of Italian collocations

The goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to describe the state of the art in the research on Italian collocations in the field of second language acquisition. The last twenty years have seen a significant increase in corpus-based collocational studies: learner corpus research has greatly contributed to the analysis of the acquisition of collocations by learners of Italian, with a central role ascribed to frequency. Secondly, the paper describes an example of a lexicographical resource issued from phraseological and learner corpus research: the DICI-A, a learner dictionary of Italian collocations. Specific issues in its composition and organization are discussed, particularly with regard to the creation of an Italian collocation profile, based on the association of each collocation to the most appropriate learner proficiency level.