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Francesca Bianchi
The cultural profile of chocolate in current Italian society: A corpus-based pilot study
The current study aimed to highlight psychological associations (or EMUs) to chocolate in contemporary Italian society and compare the analytical possibilities offered by general and specialized corpora in a task of this kind. To these purposes, concordances were generated for the Italian words for chocolate in a specialized corpus about chocolate and in a general-purpose corpus, and the semantic environment of these concordances was analyzed. Comparison between the two corpora highlighted what appear to be long-existing and well-established EMUs for chocolate in Italian society. It also suggested the possibility of evolution in the psychological associations of chocolate from the 1980s to 2005. From a methodological perspective, the findings lend support to the following two considerations: 1. suitable data for cultural analysis can equally be retrieved from a very big general corpus, or a small-to-medium-sized specialized corpus, provided that they include a wide variety of texts by different authors; 2. in cultural analysis, the major concern in corpus creation, along with text variety, seems to be time-coverage.
Empirical Text and Culture Research, RAM-Verlag
Volume: 3, 08/2007
Pages: 106-120