Collocazioni in L2 e interferenze linguistiche. Il caso di studenti universitari italofoni DaF

This essay describes a pilot study conducted at the University of Florence on Italian-speaking students of German as a foreign language (DaF – Deutsch als Fremdsprache). The study examines the linguistic phenomenon of collocations, semi-fixed and conventional lexical combinations that generally differ from language to language, and aims to identify the main difficulties encountered by participants in identifying German collocations from given Italian collocations with a nominal base and a verbal or adjectival collocator, selected according to Hausmann’s model. The following variables are identified as factors that seem to influence the collocational competence in the sample examined: (I.) the level of linguistic and metalinguistic competence; (II.) the degree of congruence between the German and Italian collocations; (III.) the morphosyntactic type of collocation. While some difficulties can be explained in terms of the frequency of collocations in language use and semantic-lexical competence in the L2, many others seem to be the result of L1 interference due to different translation strategies.