Sulle tracce dell’espressione dell’interiorità: analisi diacronica di un corpus di narrativa italiana del XIX-XX secolo

Abstract

This article concerns an example of statistical analysis of a large diachronic corpus, including 100 works of Italian fiction, with the aim of recognizing prototypical trends in words frequencies and identifying clusters of words that share similar temporal patterns. Starting from the insights of literary scholars, this study tries to test the hypothesis (often brought forward in literary history) that the inner life of the authors and/or their characters gained more importance during the Nineteenth century and represents one of the cornerstones of modernism. Although this hypothesis cannot be rejected, the adopted statistical methods do not highlight clear-cut temporal patterns: some slight trends emerge but a large share of words individually show an undifferentiated behaviour over time. The idea of studying the occurrence in the texts of the inner expression of the writers from a diachronic perspective is certainly very ambitious. This first experiment shows some strengths of the statistical tools but also some limits of the criteria adopted for both the constitution of the corpus and the selection of linguistic features to be observed.