Italian food terms and their collocations in America : a corpus-based, cultural and lexicological perspective

America has been in love with Italian food since it first arrived on its shores at the end of the 19th century during the first migration wave. Since then, a process of culinary but also linguistic hybridization has transformed Italian traditional recipes made in the US and has given origin to new English phrases involving Italian food terms, often outside the cuisine boundaries. The present work sets out to investigate the cultural, culinary and, above all, terminological development of Italian food and its linguistic labels in America through analysis of collocations extracted from two large American English corpora.