Padronanza del lessico e fraseologia in apprendenti intermedi di italiano L2. Un’indagine basata su bigrammi e misure di associazione

The current study aims at consolidating corpus-based investigation of Second Language Acquisition by focusing on the connection between phraseology and vocabulary control. Two subcorpora were selected from the Merlin Learner Corpus based on task difficulty and learner proficiency in vocabulary control. The groups were compared to assess whether an in- crease in control implies an increase in a text’s bigrams collocational strength. Results show that in the corpus the passage from the B1 to B2 level is characterised by an increase in the mean Mutual Information score of texts. Further, with respect to their B1 peers, B2 learners produce more at- tracted bigrams, but not highly attracted ones. Implications for teaching and further research are discussed.