The DIA project. Dictionary of Academic Italian: textual forms and functions
Presented by the University for Foreigners of Siena (Coordinator: Eugenio Salvatore) together with the Universities of Milan (coordinator: Michela Dota) and Venice (PI: Davide Mastrantonio) the project is the recipient of a PRIN PNRR 2022 grant awarded by the Ministry of University and Research and the European Union (NextGeneration EU).
Academic Italian can be identified as the set of forms and functions that typically occur in formal texts (handbooks, research articles, etc.) transversally to disciplinary fields. Academic Italian is a strategic language variety in order to build a democratic and inclusive society since it is involved in many activities, relevant both from the cognitive point of view and the social engagement: education, scientific research, proper access to information, and participation in public debate.
In spite of its relevance, academic Italian is still an understudied variety, unlike e.g. academic English. From this perspective, the DIA project aims to fill a double gap:
- to start a systematic formal and functional inquiry of the academic variety of Italian based on the analysis of a wide corpus;
- to create an open-access digital dictionary that allows the query of academic expressions by forms and functions.
Whereas similar tools already exist for English, which has long been the lingua franca of international scholarly communication, the DIA would be the first of its kind for Italian. As a digital instrument, compared to paper dictionaries, the DIA would also have the advantage of greater inclusiveness, ease of searchability and future growth.
The potential recipients of the DIA are first and foremost students and teachers involved in formal writing learning/teaching processes: in highschools and universities, in the humanities and sciences, in L1 and L2/LS contexts. But the DIA would also be usable by writers outside the school or university settings who are nevertheless increasingly confronted with the need to write clear and fluent formal texts. In addition to facilitating written production and its teaching, the DIA would help its users to become familiar with the functional categories on which academic texts are based, and would thereby improve comprehension and study strategies themselves.