Collocations in contrast: a question of food and cibo

Collocations can give insight into how people experience the world. Research on collocational behavior in the last few years has highlighted the evident presence in language of sexism and ethnicity, often triggered by fixed ideas and commonplaces. Stereotypes also exist between peoples of different nationalities and their eating habits, and yet little research seems to have been done in this direction. By examining word sketches of the lemmas food and cibo retrieved from The Sketch Engine corpus, we will show, among other things, that in Italy cibo is a prerogative; in England food is a privilege.