The CONTRAST-IT research instruments and website, designed and coordinated by Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria De Cesare, are outputs of two Swiss National Science Foundation research projects carried out at the Italian Institute of the University of Basel between 2011 and 2017. You can find more information on these two projects by clicking on the following links:

• Italian Constituent Order in a Contrastive Perspective (ICOCP), http://p3.snf.ch/Project-133716
• Italian Sentence Adverbs in a Contrastive Perspective (ISAaC), http://p3.snf.ch/Project-159273

The general goal of these two projects was to compare Italian with four other languages: French, Spanish, English and German (you find relevant output of these projects in the REFERENCES section, under the heading SPECIFIC REFERENCES). The corpora created for this purpose are based on small to medium size text collections (totalling ca. 2 million words) of very high quality. All the sources, dates and authorship of the texts have been manually checked, categorized appropriately and enriched with some metadata. 

All the texts collected are authentic, full-length electronic journalistic articles, chosen on the basis of their high representativeness of contemporary Italian, French, Spanish, English and German. Most of these texts are still available online. You find more information on the data by clicking CORPORA. 

The following SNSF-collaborators have helped collecting the texts used to create the CONTRAST-IT and COMPARE-IT corpora as well as the database (SYNDATA):

• Dr. des. Rocío Agar Marco (Spanish)
• Dr. des. Ana Albom (Italian from Switzerland, Italian from Canada)
• Dr. Laura Baranzini (Italian, French)
• M.A. Boris Bouquet (Italian from Italy; Italian from Switzerland; French, German; English)
• Dr. Doriana Cimmino (English)
• M.A. Valentina Di Cesare (Italian from Switzerland)
• Dr. Davide Garassino (English)
• Dr. Marta Lupica Spagnolo (German)
• M.A. Michela Puopolo (Italian from Italy; Italian from Switzerland; French, German; English)
• M.A. Elisa Tekin (Italian from Switzerland, French, German)

M.A. Elisa Tekin is also responsible for the careful preparation of the data on which the CONTRAST-IT and COMPARE-IT corpora are based and for the creation of this website.

Finally, I am greatly indepted to Lorenzo Gregori (Università di Firenze) for his help in the creation of the corpora CONTRAST-IT and COMPARE-IT, as well as the websites hosting them.

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If you use the CONTRAST-IT research instruments in your work, please acknowledge it by referring to: 

De Cesare, Anna-Maria (2011-2018), CONTRAST-IT. University of Basel <link it home>https://contrast-it.philhist.unibas.ch/en/home/