Informal Correspondence by Greek Learners of the Italian Language: A Study Based on Learner Corpora, Native Corpora and Textbooks

The aim of this study is to compare various lexical structures between a learner corpus of students with Italian as a foreign language and a reference monolingual Italian corpus. More specifically, the first is a learner corpus (part of a wider learner corpus) comprised of Greek students studying Italian as a foreign language while the second is the CWIC reference corpus of native Italian speakers. The research findings help us explain the role of didactic material in comprehending linguistic structures that are found in informal letters/emails and, moreover, they provide us valuable information regarding the use of the same lexical structures by native speakers.