(approved by the Board of Directors on 07/11/2017, minutes no. 77)
The Linguistic Research Centre on Corpora (CLC) of Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT brings together professors belonging to the degree courses in the linguistic area of the Department of International Humanities and Social Sciences active in the field of corpus linguistics research and specialised in analysis of written and oral texts, interpreted and translated speech, L2 interaction and learning varieties. The development of research with the use of technologies applied to linguistic analysis has an immediate application in the teaching of various courses: interpretation, translation and language, terminology and applied linguistics (sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, textual linguistics, pragmatics).
Scientific Director
Laura Mori
Department of International Humanities and Social Sciences
Objectives
The CLC intends to support the research activities carried out by its members, promoting scientific dialogue within the Department and the creation of new synergies from an international perspective.
The CLC aims to disseminate the scientific results achieved by the members and to encourage the exchange of knowledge regarding in particular the development of applied research protocols, the use of programs dedicated to linguistic analysis on corpora, the development of linguistic databases and of terminological repertoires.
The CLC presents itself as a sharing space for UNINT lecturers and undergraduates/graduates in constant connection with the outside world for the advancement of research and the improvement of teaching practices.
Fields of research
The research activities conducted by the members of the CLC are oriented towards scientific development in the following thematic areas:
- corpus-based sociolinguistics (specialist and sectoral varieties);
- corpus-based acquisitional linguistics (L2 varieties);
- corpus-based discourse and conversation analysis;
- translation on parallel and/or comparable corpora;
- translation memories and databases;
- corpus-based terminology and phraseology.
University Research Committee
The members of the CLC have scientific publications to their credit that refer to their activities in the field of linguistic research on corpora. The current configuration of the CLC involves the involvement of tenured and contract lecturers, experts on the subject belonging to the degree courses in the linguistic area of Department of International Humanities and Social Sciences.
Furthermore the CLC includes external, national and European members, who collaborate within research projects developed by UNINT.
Members
Lorenzo Blini
Michael Sherman Boyd
Marina Brancaccio
Stefania Cerrito
Claudia Coppola
Manuela Frontera
Najla Kalach
Fiorenza Mileto
Laura Mori
Lucilla Pizzoli
Federica Politanò
Fabio Proia
Claudio Russello
Annalisa Sandrelli
External members
Lucja Biel
UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW
Giuditta Caliendo
UNIVERSITÉ DE LILLE
Paolo Cavanese
UNIVERSITÉ DE GENÈVE
Sandro Caruana
UNIVERSITY OF MALTA
Sara Castagnoli
UNIVERSITÀ DI MACERATA
Chiara Degano
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI ROMA TRE
Gatis Dilans
VENTSPILS UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
Eman El Sherbiny Ismail
UNIVERSITÄT POTSDAM
Vittorio Ganfi
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MODENA E REGGIO EMILIA
Claudio Fantinuoli
JOHANNES GUTENBERG-UNIVERSITÄT MAINZ
Annarita Felici
UNIVERSITÉ DE GENÈVE
Adriano Ferraresi
UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA
Rudy Loock
UNIVERSITY OF LILLE-CHARLES
DE GAULLE
Mikhail Mikahilov
UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE
Valentina Piunno
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI BERGAMO
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Vilelmini Sosoni
IONIAN UNIVERSITY OF CORFÙ
Rubén González Vallejo
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MACERATA
Area research projects and groups
Over the last few years UNINT has financed the following research projects and supported the activities of research groups that fall within the objectives pursued by the CLC:
Observing Eurolect Network (OEN)
The research group represents the continuation of the Eurolect Observatory Project (EOP), directed by the lecturer Laura Mori, and which took place in two phases (2013-2016 and 2017-2020).
The UNINT Eurolect Observatory research group, coordinated by the lecturer Laura Mori, was born within the Department of Interpreting and Translation (FIT) and was financed by the University Research Fund of Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT.
The first phase (2013-2016) of research activities on 11 languages - Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Maltese, Polish, Spanish - saw the participation of European academics from various Italian and foreign universities (Institute for the Languages of Finland, Ionian University, Ghent University, Paris Diderot University, University of Malta, University of Warsaw, Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, University of Tampere, Ventspils University College).
The research group focused on the analysis of corpora of EU directives and national legislative transposition texts written in the 11 languages under study in order to:
- verify and/or confirm the hypothesis of the existence of legal language varieties of the European Union (the so-called eurolects), which originated and established themselves within the linguistic diasystems of some member countries, or in parts of them;
- highlight the linguistic differences between the Eurolects and the respective national legal language varieties in order to offer functional elements for reflection on linguistic and translation variation;
- provide reference data to the entities involved or interested (Language Services of the EU institutions; national, regional and autonomous chambers);
- produce useful results for improving the editorial quality of legal texts (legal drafting), both at a national and supranational level.
GEROM
GEROM is the final product of an Italian-German project born and implemented within the Fachbereich Translations-, Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft (FTSK) of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz/Germersheim and the Department of Interpreting and Translation (FIT) of Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT. The project was divided into two phases, between 2013 and 2015. In the first phase, the project coordinators brought together students and undergraduates in two working groups to evaluate the contribution of the terminology to the Italian-German dialogue. In the second phase, a Round Table was organised which allowed discussion with language professionals, researchers and university professors specialised in terminology and corpus linguistics.
Dub-Talk and TV-Talk
Dub-Talk Project – 2013/2015 – and TV-Talk – 2016/2018 – The project aims to study the characteristics of television and cinema speech and its translation into dubbing, the most widespread in Italy. The collaboration between Università di Pisa (Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics) and Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT, which began in 2013, aims to broaden the scope of this project, setting up a common parallel corpus, consisting of transcripts of original dialogue and dubbed dialogue from US and British TV series and films.
UNINTerm
In 2023, the Research Group on Terminology (UNINTerm) was established within the Linguistic Research Centre on Corpora (CLC). Given the close connection between terminology/terminography and corpus linguistics, the Group's activities fall fully within the scope of investigation of the CLC, which also includes among its thematic areas terminology and phraseology extracted with corpus-based and corpus-driven methodologies. The activities of UNINTerm aim to extend the field of research to the languages included in the educational offer of UNINT degree courses and to make use of interdisciplinary contributions from different scientific areas, internal or external to the University.
Activities
The Linguistic Research Centre on Corpora annually organises a series of corpus linguistics research seminars (Corpus Linguistics Workshops) available in the "Seminars" section below.
The seminars constitute a moment of in-depth analysis of methodological issues, presentation of mixed analysis approaches (qualitative and quantitative), use of software for the description of linguistic variation through the use of synchronic and diachronic corpora and databases.
The seminars, held both by members of the CLC and by invited speakers, are open to all people interested in the potential of corpora for linguistic research.
The seminars aim to promote reflection and exchange within the scientific community and represent an opportunity for growth for undergraduate and graduate students who intend to make use of technological resources for the analysis of linguistic data from a sociolinguistic, pragmatic, translation and terminological perspective.
Seminars
All the events of the Research Centre
Digital archive
To date, the following corpora, digital catalogues and portals have been collected within Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma – UNINT, as research products of financed group projects (also with the collaboration of undergraduates and graduates of the linguistic area) by the University Research Committee.
Corpora
Corpus MULPOLDIS
Corpus MULPOLDIS (Multilingual Multimodal Political Discourse): starting from 2020, the CLC has concentrated its activity on the creation of a digital space for the archiving of corpora derived from master's thesis works in textual linguistics and pragmatics, linguistics of the languages of study, interpretation and translation which involved a collection of oral texts.
Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus
Eurolect Observatory Multilingual Corpus (Eurolect Observatory Project): the multilingual corpus includes a total of 11 languages. UNINT financed the establishment of sub-corpus A and B of the following languages: English, French, Italian, Maltese, Polish and sub-corpus C (scientific manager: lecturer Laura Mori) Sub-corpus A: 660 directives in 8 linguistic versions (1/1/1999 – 31/12/2008) concerning all EU policies; Sub-corpus B: national measures implementing the directives of sub-corpus A in Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Malta, Poland, Spain. Sub-corpus C: rules of national origin in English, German, Italian, Spanish.
Dub-Talk Corpus
Dub-Talk Corpus (Dub-Talk Project): parallel corpus of transcriptions of dubbed TV series and films (scientific director: lecturer Annalisa Sandrelli).
TV-talk Corpus
TV-talk Corpus (TV-Talk Project): corpus in the combinations English > Italian and Italian > English including different genres and new translation methods, including voice-over (symil-synch) and subtitling (scientific director: lecturer Annalisa Sandrelli).
Digital catalogues
Focus on Eurolects
Focus on Eurolects: As of 2021, a database has been set up to provide an overview of studies, conducted as part of individual or group research projects, dealing with one or more legal language varieties used in EU legislation (“Eurolects ”). In most cases they analyse and compare data from legislative corpora (e.g. EU directives and national transposition measures) or judgments issued by the EU Court of Justice and/or national courts.
The titles of the publications are divided into two sections, depending on the method and approach adopted by the author or authors. The first section (“Monolingual studies”) includes studies examining the EU and the national legal language used in a particular EU Member State (e.g. German Eurolect on the one hand, the German variety in use in the Federal Republic of Germany on the other). The works that extend their field of investigation to two or more Eurolects are listed in the second section (“Multilingual studies”). All titles are grouped by language, indicated by the corresponding ISO 639-1 code, and presented in chronological order. The acronym EOP in brackets indicates the works that were published by the participants in the first and second phases of the Eurolect Observatory Project (2013-2016 and 2017-2020). The last two sections are dedicated respectively to degree and doctoral theses, both published and unpublished, and to book reviews.
Portals
GEROM
GEROM – German-Italian Terminology Portal (GEROM Project): lexical and textual platform, bilingual and dynamic, to support the analysis and translation of texts on topics of politics, society and culture of German and Italian speaking countries (responsible scientific: lecturer Fabio Proia)
