Corpora e storia della lingua

Abstract

During the last twenty years, in particular at the lexical level, the study of the history of the Italian language has benefited greatly from corpora including literary texts, such as “Letteratura Italiana Zanichelli” or “Biblioteca Italiana” (and, perspectively, the Italian section of the ELTeC - European Literary Text Collection). However, those corpora were compiled mainly according to the literary canon, and they include a small number of texts compared to the time span they are supposed to cover. Thus, they can provide a limited account of the evolution of literary Italian in time. Today, a large number of texts are available online (to begin with Google Books), covering a large time span and broad variety of genres. The analysis of such large corpora calls for suitable tools and approaches to ensure their effective distant reading. Consequently, the interdisciplinary cooperation of linguists, statisticians and academics of literature may lead to an innovative approach to the study of corpora to assess the evolution of literary language.