Gli omonimi italiani più frequenti: un’analisi corpus-based

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to obtain frequency information about Italian high-frequency homonyms using corpus-derived data. A list of 6.415 homoforms was compiled, corresponding to 15.669 homonyms (e.g. the homoform anche corresponds to the two homonyms anche adv./conj. and anche plur. of the noun anca ‘hip’). For each homoform, the relative frequencies of the corresponding homonyms were obtained by manually checking the occurrences in the Corpus di riferimento dell’italiano scritto (CORIS). It emerges that most homonyms are strongly unbalanced, since for 85% of them the most common one accounts for 90% or more of the total occurrences of the homoform. Two sets of high-frequency homonyms are provided in the paper: a list of the 45 most frequent homonyms, whether or not they share the same part of speech (e.g. comune adj. and comune noun); and a list of the 50 most frequent homonyms belonging to the same part of speech (e.g. calcio ‘kick’ and calcio ‘calcium’). Some pedagogical and research implications of these findings are briefly discussed.