Phraseology and Collocation A Corpus Based Description of English Lexical Collocations Used by Italian Advanced Learners

The present work is a pilot study of English lexical collocations in written productions by advanced Italian students of English. The aim is to describe errors made by learners in the production of word combinations. First a working definition of lexical collocation will be given in order to identify those word combinations that will be taken into consideration. Then, after introducing the data used and the methodology for its classification, collocational errors will be analysed from a quantitative and qualitative point of view by considering factors such as L1 influence, structural properties and degree of fixedness of wrong collocations. It will emerge that the L1 has a relevant role in the generation of wrong lexical collocations and that certain types of collocations are more error prone than others. Finally the implications of these observations are discussed with reference to the need for adequate treatment of collocations in lexicographic works.