Islands Isles Isole: A Sketch Engine Based Corpus Analysis

According to Van Dijk (2018) it is feasible to delineate the mental model of the underlying notion held by an epistemic community by looking at the occurrences of a lexical item in a representative corpus. In this socio-cognitive study, the Sketch Engine platform’s tools are used to describe the collocational patterns of the English lemmas ISLAND/ISLE and their Italian equivalent ISOLA in two large corpora, following the model offered by Arroyo Hernández (2020). The investigation of semantic preferences and perceived semantic prosody shows an insular narrative, which is widely shared in both languages, in which the island is portrayed as a desired area defined by beauty and suggestion while also being vulnerable.