Abstract

Like other European languages, Italian language designates the First World War with several names, that are multiword expressions: groups of lexemes continuous, more or less frozen, made up of a sequences of two or more lexemes; they may have an idiomatic sense, to a higher or a lesser degree, and their properties are not predictable from the properties of the individual lexemes or their normal mode of combination. The paper dedicates at first some reflections to the multiword expressions phenomenon. Then it analyzes some Italian names of the First World War in the 20th Century referring to DiaCORIS database, a diachronic "corpus" comprising written Italian texts produced between 1861 and 2001.