Ladder: a corpus for pragmatic competences in Italian L1/L2

Résumé 0

A collection of elicited e-mails and instant messages (written and oral) for the pragmatic analysis of requests, cancellations, apologies and other speech acts collected within the LADDER project (2019-31.3.2024). Data was collected between April 2020 and December 2023 using a discourse completion task (DCT). The data comprises of e-mails, instant messages, and oral messages. The informants include German learners of Italian between A2-C1 level according to the CEFR, most of whom are students living in Tyrol (Austria), native speakers of Italian, most of whom are students from Rome (Italy), and non-native speakers of Italian accessing the Exam CertIt for the B1 level in Italian. The data of Austrian learners were largely collected by students of the undergraduate seminar Insegnare la pragmatica at the Institute of Didactics of the University of Innsbruck, under the guidance of Dr. Nicola Brocca. The data of native speakers were largely collected from students of foreign languages at the University RomaTre, in collaboration with Prof. Elena Nuzzo. The DCTs have been conducted with online questionnaires. Along with the texts, metadata were also registered with the help of an online questionnaire giving sociolinguistic information about the informant (age, self-assessed language level, place of residence, native language, etc.). The DCTs aim to elicit linguistic acts of request and refusal in increasing levels of social distance and different media (Taguchi & Roever, 2017, pp. 85, 231). The DCTs elicit different speech acts (requests and refusals) with different degrees of formality (study/work or free time), directed at different people (lecturer, friend, boss) and in different media (mail or instant messaging). The scenarios represent authentic circumstances for the students. The instrument is descripted in the READ_ME text files.