The New Basic Vocabulary of Italian as a linguistic resource
Authors: Isabella Chiari, Tullio De Mauro (Sapienza Università di Roma, 2014)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
The New Basic Vocabulary of Italian (NVdB) is a reference linguistic resource for contemporary Italian de-scribing most used and understood words of the language. The paper offers an overview of the objectives of the work, its main features and most relevant lin-guistic and computational applications.

Introduction
1 Introduction Core dictionaries are precious resources that rep-resent the most widely known (in production and reception) lexemes of a language. Among the most significant features characterizing basic vocabulary of a language is the high textual cov-erage of a small number of lexemes (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 top ranking words in fre-quency lists), their large polysemy, their relation-ship to the oldest lexical heritage of a language, their relevance in fist and second language learn-ing and teaching and as reference tools for lexi-cal analysis. Many recent corpus based works have been produced to provide up-to-date core dictionaries to many European languages (e.g. the Routledge frequency dictionary series). Italian language has a number reference frequency lists all of which are related to corpora and collections of texts dating 1994 or earlier (among the most relevant Bortolini et al., 1971; Juilland and Traversa, 1973; De Mauro et al., 1993; Bertinetto et al. 2005). The Basic Vocabulary of Italian (VdB, De Mauro, 1980) first appeared as an annex to Guida all’uso delle parole and has been subsequently included in all lexicographic works directed by Tullio De Mauro, with some minor changes. VdB has benefited from a combination of statistical criteria for the selection of lemmas (both grammatical and content words) mainly based on a frequency list of written Italian, LIF (Bortolini et al., 1972) and later on a frequency list of spoken Italian, LIP (De Mauro et al., 1993) – and independent evaluations further submitted to experimentation on primary school pupils. The last version of VdB was published in 2007 in an additional tome of GRADIT (De Mauro, 1999) and counts about 6,700 lemmas, organised in three vocabulary ranges. Fundamental vocabulary (FO) includes the highest frequency words that cover about 90% of all written and spoken text occurrences [appartamento ‘apartment’, commercio ‘commerce’, cosa ‘thing’, fiore ‘flower’, improvviso ‘sudden’, incontro ‘meeting’, malato ‘ill’, odiare ‘to hate’], while high usage vocabulary (AU) covers about 6% of the subsequent high frequency words [acciaio ‘steel’, concerto ‘concert’, fase ‘phase’, formica ‘ant’, inaugurazione ‘inauguration’, indovinare ‘to guess’, parroco ‘parish priest’, pettinare ‘to comb’]. On the contrary high availability (AD) vocabulary is not based on textual statistical resources but is derived from a psycholinguistic insight experimentally verified, and is to be intended in the tradition of the vocabulaire de haute disponibilité, first introduced in the Français fondamentale project (Michéa, 1953; Gougenheim, 1964). VdB thus integrates high frequency vocabulary ranges with the socalled high availability vocabulary (haute disponibilité) and thus provides a full picture of not only written and spoken usages, but also purely mental usages of word (commonly regarding words having a specific relationship with the concreteness of ordinary life) [abbaiare to ‘bark’, ago ‘needle’, forchetta ‘fork’, mancino ‘left-handed’, pala ‘shovel’, pescatore ‘fisherman’]. From the first edition of VdB many things have changed in Italian society and language: Italian language was then used only by 50% of the population. Today Italian is used by 95% of the population. Many things have changed in the conditions of use of the language for the speakers and the relationship between Italian language and dialects have been deeply transformed. The renovated version of VdB, NVdB (Chiari and De Mauro, in press), will be presented and previewed in this paper. NVdB is a linguistic resource designed to meet three different purposes: a linguistic one, to be intended in both a theoretical and a descriptive sense, an educationallinguistic one and a regulative one, for the development of guidelines in public communication. The educational objective is focused on providing a resource to develop tools for language teaching and learning, both for first and second language learners. The descriptive lexicological objective is providing a lexical resource that can be used as a reference in evaluating behaviour of lexemes belonging to different text typologies, taking into account the behaviour of different lexemes both from an empirical-corpus based approach and an experimental (intuition based) approach and enable the description of linguistic changes that affected most commonly known words in Italian from the Fifties up to today. The descriptive objective is tightly connected to the possible computational applications of the resource in tools able to process general language and take into account its peculiar behaviour. The regulative objective regards the use of VdB as a reference for the editing of administrative texts, and in general, for easy reading texts.

Conclusion
4 Conclusion and future developments The NVdB of Italian is be distributed as a fre-quency dictionary of lemmatized lexemes and multiword, with data on coverage, frequency, dispersion, usage labels, grammatical qualifica-tions in all subcorpora. A linguistic analysis and comparison with previous data is also provided with full methodological documentation. The core dictionary and data are also distribut-ed electronically in various formats in order to be used as a reference tool for different applications. Future work will be to integrate data from the core dictionary with new lexicographic entries (glosses, examples, collocations) in order to pro-vide a tool useful both for first and second lan-guage learners and for further computational ap-plications.