Twitter Italian Negation Corpus: Frequency Lists

<p>Negation is one of the most widely discussed language change phenomena in Romance languages, especially French, but innovative forms and non-standard uses have also been observed in Italian, potentially pointing to grammaticalisation processes.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>The Twitter Italian Negation Corpus (TIN corpus) consists of 10,000 tweets in Italian. The posts were tweeted from users in ten Italian and non-Italian cities: Milan, Rome, Naples, Palermo, Bologna, Turin, Florence, Cagliari, Genua and New York City. The corpus was collected in August 2019 using a web scraping data collection method. In order to counter the problem of the rarity of non-standard negations, program-based Twitter queries were used and gradually narrowed down to contexts in which verbs and negative particles frequently occur.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>From this perspective, Twitter proves to be a medium of spontaneous speech influential to informal communication situations. The most common verbs were vulgar lexemes (<em>fotte</em> &lt; <em>fottersene</em> &lsquo;shit on something&rsquo;, <em>frega</em> &lt; <em>fregarsene</em> &lsquo;don&#39;t care&rsquo;), but also neutral verbs (interessa &lt; interessarsi &lsquo;concern somebody&rsquo; and <em>importa</em> &lt; <em>importare</em> (intransitive) &lsquo;mean something to someone&rsquo;). Among the nouns used as complements of these verbs, the former taboo word <em>un cazzo</em> &lsquo;penis&rsquo; ranked first by far. Deviations from the standard such as the omission of the preverbal non &lsquo;not&rsquo; and use of <em>cazzo</em> as a bare noun show that Twitter not only mirrors these rare variants, but also contributes to their establishment.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>Drawing from the results of the following frequency lists, this process can be understood as grammaticalization, which develops in parallel to a pragmaticalization process. The ten frequency list files are in csv format.</p>