1 Introduction

The electronicization of Italian corpora began in the 1950s, driving the development of corpus linguistics. The construction of the Italian language corpus has yielded abundant results, but there is a relative lack of research in China. There is more research on corpora of common languages such as English in China, while there is less research on non common languages such as Italian. The Italian language corpus has the characteristics of diversity and wide application, which has reference significance for domestic research. In recent years, China has begun to pay attention to the creation of Italian language corpora, such as the parallel corpus of Chinese Italian Chinese literature created by the research team of Beijing Foreign Studies University, the contemporary Italian language corpus itGLOBE, and the Italian news corpus ItalianWac. The corpus based research in the domestic Italian language academic community is still in its infancy. The Italian academic community has achieved fruitful results in the study of Italian linguistics. This article will introduce the construction, development, and application research of Italian language corpora, including the historical context, current situation, main research institutions and teams, open source corpora, and application cases of open source corpora in different linguistic fields.

2 Development of Italian Corpus

The development process of Italian language corpora can be divided into three stages: from the 1960s to the 1980s, paper materials were the main source, and the corpus size was relatively small; The application of scanning technology from the 1980s to the early 21st century led to the expansion of corpus size; The development of the Internet since the 21st century has made it possible to use super large corpora. The main research institutions for Italian corpus linguistics include the Computer Linguistics Research Institute of the Italian National Research Council, the Linguistics Laboratory of the Higher Normal University of Pisa, the Italian Language Laboratory of the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Florence, the Collaborative Research Center for Literary Information Text at the University of Rome, the De Mauro School at the University of Rome, the Corpus Linguistics Research Team at the University of Turin, the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Linguistics at the University of Bologna, the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Signal Analysis and Synthesis at the University of Naples Frederick II, and the European Language Research Observation Laboratory at the University of Salerno. These institutions and teams have their own characteristics in corpus construction, research methods, and focus.

Research based on the Italian Open Source Corpus

The application of Italian open-source corpora in linguistic research is extensive, involving multiple fields such as morphology, syntax, second language acquisition and foreign language education, pragmatics, etc. In morphological research, corpus data is helpful for analyzing morphological changes and affix usage. For example, Calpestrati (2017) conducted an in-depth analysis of the use of reinforced prefixes, discovering the collocation patterns and cross linguistic differences between different prefixes and parts of speech. Cacchiani (2011) compared the functions and usage of affixes in English and Italian, revealing the differences in affix usage between the two languages.

4 Conclusion

The Italian language corpus has gone through three stages of development since its electronicization in the 1950s, with abundant achievements. There are numerous linguistic research teams in the Italian language library, centered around universities such as the University of Rome, with diverse research directions. Research based on open-source corpora is extensive, covering areas such as morphology, syntax, second language acquisition, foreign language teaching, and pragmatic analysis, providing reference for domestic research.