In this essay we propose a reflection on the social meaning that takes the word ‘catastrophe’ in Italian, through the investigation of the historical literary collocations of the term and on the current ones through different corpora. This research is part of Cognitive Linguistics and Semantics.

The acquisition of the definite article by LS/L2 Italian learners represents a very delicate issue, on the one hand, in relation to the mother tongue and other known languages and, on the other, to the range of uses of this part of the discussion (among others, cf. Chini 1995a; Pallotti 1998). The research is exploratory, and the results allow us to examine a sector of applied linguistics and language teaching that is still little investigated (Krámský 2016).

The health emergency, caused by viruses SARS-CoV-2, has been a major challenge for the teaching of foreign languages and Italian. This essay investigates the main criticalities of distance learning by a representative sample of teachers, in the first phase of the health emergency.