Register variation and the progressive alternation in written Italian: a corpus dataset

This dataset supports the study of register variation in written Italian, with a focus on the Progressive alternation — the choice between the periphrastic progressive (stare + gerund) and the simple present indicative (presente indicativo) in contexts where both are grammatically available. It accompanies the paper in preparation: L'alternanza progressiva e i suoi registri. Esplorare la variazione attraverso la semantica distribuzionale (Paolini, Erriu, Marzo). Sources and sampling Observations were extracted automatically from two corpora of written Italian, representing two distinct registers: CORIS/CODIS (Rossini Favretti 2000), stampa subsection (post-2000): a balanced reference corpus of written Italian representing the press register. Contexts were defined as the preceding and following sentence relative to the target occurrence. The 200 most frequent Italian verbs were selected based on the De Mauro frequency list. ItTenTen20 (Jakubíček et al. 2013, via Sketch Engine), filtered by the domain blogspot.com to approximate informal written register (blog). Contexts consist of 20 tokens to the left and right of the target. The first 1500–2000 occurrences of present-indicative-tagged verbs were sampled. Dataset contents The dataset consists of four files, two per register, one for each variant: File Register Variant Observations coris_stampa Press (CORIS) stare + gerund 660 (64%) coris_indicativo Press (CORIS) Simple present 372 (36%) blog_gerundio Blog (ItTenTen20) stare + gerund 478 (61%) blog_indicativo Blog (ItTenTen20) Simple present 303 (39%) Total: 1,785 observations (963 press + 822 blog). Each file contains one observation per row with the following columns: Column Description id_testo Text identifier periodo_monitor Corpus monitoring period subc / sect Subcorpus and section label id_frase Sentence identifier contesto_sx Left context osservazione Target sentence containing the variant contesto_dx Right context variante Variant type: ger (gerund/progressive) or pres (simple present) soggetto Full subject expression soggetto_testa Head noun of the subject num_persona Grammatical person and number (e.g. 3s, 1p) verbo Verb form as it appears in the text verb_lemma Lemma of the main verb marker_temporale Temporal marker present in the clause, or no_temp_marker negazione Negation: neg or no_neg relativa Relative clause: rel or no_rel discorso_diretto Direct speech: dd, no_dd, or dd_unclear v_fraseologici Phasal/aspectual verb present: v_fl, v_fi, or no_vf On a final note: The corpus excerpts included in this dataset are reproduced for research purposes from CORIS/CODIS (Rossini Favretti 2000) and ItTenTen20 (Jakubíček et al. 2013). Users should refer to the original corpus licenses for any further redistribution of the raw text.