DISDIRE UN APPUNTAMENTO: SPUNTI PER LA DIDATTICA DELL’ITALIANO L2 A PARTIRE DA UN CORPUS DI PARLANTI NATIVI

In this paper we will to show how a corpus for research on pragmatic aspects of Italian can also be an interesting resource for teaching the language to foreigners. The corpus on which the paper is based comes from a pragmatic transcultural project devoted to the language of refusing an invitation. Specifically, the paper analyzes how Italians usually cancel an earlier commitment by accepting an invitation. The sample data analysis offers several interesting ideas for a description of cancelling in Italian, useful for those who want to explicitly reflect this L2-based Linguistic Act. It includes the most common patterns for making a cancellation, the type of modifiers used and variations linked to the social distance between the person cancelling and the recipient of the cancellation.