“Sopratavola soprammobile come dite voi”: Lists in L1 and L2

Lists are a cognitive resource for speakers and have a wide range of semantic and pragmatic functions. One of the main objectives of this paper is to further clarify the links between lists and language proficiency. To do so, we focused on lists produced by native and non-native Italian speakers during a lexical search in the context of spontaneous spoken language. The study presented here is based on a corpus of oral productions elicited through a task. As the paper will show, some elements usually considered in the literature as completely disparate can be considered together within the framework of lists. Furthermore, it will show the gradual emergence as construction of a particular subset of lists of lexical searches.