Welcome to the website CONTRAST-IT hosted at the Department of Languages and Literatures of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Basel. The general aim of this website is to promote research in the fields of contrastive and comparative linguistics by making new research instruments freely available. These instruments have been developed in the frame of two Swiss National Science Foundation projects (ICOCP  and ISAaC) directed by Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria De Cesare at the Italian Institute of the University of Basel between 2011 and 2017.

Follow the links at the top of this page (or below) to access the resources available. These resources comprise three components:

• TWO COMPARABLE CORPORA: the CONTRAST-IT and COMPARE-IT corpora; the CONTRAST-IT comparable corpus includes texts written in Italian, French, Spanish, English and German; the COMPARE-IT comparable corpus is based on texts written in Italian in three countries (Italy, Switzerland and Canada)
• SYNDATA: the SYNDATA corpus collection; this is a corpus collection of marked syntactic constructions, most of which have been extracted from the CONTRAST-IT and COMPARE-IT corpora
• REFERENCES: a specialized list of references; this list includes both general and specific works devoted to the study of Italian in a contrastive and comparative perspective with other languages

The research instruments accessible through this website allow investigating a wide array of linguistic, textual, pragmatic and cultural phenomena. Since the data collection is composed of articles published in online newspapers, these research instruments are also well-suited to investigating electronic mass media. Note that the CORPORA only include text data. Images and videos are not available.

The research instruments accessible through this website should be valuable to a wide spectrum of potential users: scholars working in the field of contrastive and comparative linguistics; scholars conducting empirical research from a microtypological perspective; bilingual lexicographers; translators; language teachers and students of Italian as L1 and L2. 

For questions or comments on the content of this website, or if you want to acknowledge scientific work based on the research instruments described in this website (your publications will be included in the References section), please e-mail: anna-maria.decesare@clutterunibas.ch .