Dialogic interaction in diachrony: a pragmatic history of the Italian language - DIADIta

This project belongs to the research field of historical pragmatics, to which it aims to contribute significantly by pursuing three main objectives. The first objective is to identify, describe and interpret the communicative models and pragmatic strategies characteristic of the linguistic history of Italian, considered in their mutual relationship within dialogic interaction. The second objective is to investigate the diachronic evolution of these communicative models and pragmatic strategies through a chronological span that goes from the Novellino to 20th-century texts. This research therefore aims not only to describe and explain the communicative models used in the past, but also their development, identifying specific paths of pragmatic change. The third objective is the design and implementation of a corpus of pragmatically annotated texts, the DIADIta corpus, in order to explore and make further searchable the communicative models documented in the representation of dialogic interaction. From a theoretical point of view, these objectives presuppose the development of a model guiding the interpretation of the data and the design of a methodological apparatus consistent with it, and functional to the annotation of the DIADIta pragmatic corpus. We therefore propose to outline an integrated analytical model: integrated, because it is aimed at programmatically exploring the functional interaction of different linguistic categories (in a broad sense) in the pursuit of a given communicative purpose. From a methodological point of view, the project aims at the release of a reliable, verifiable and replicable annotation scheme for the analysis of pragmatic units in a historical perspective. These theoretical and methodological assumptions will allow to pursue the following results in relation to the objectives outlined above: - SYSTEMATIC MAPPING OF PRAGMATIC FORMS AND FUNCTIONS in the selected texts and their annotation; - IDENTIFICATION OF THE MAIN PRAGMATIC CHANGES occurred in the history of Italian, and their interconnection with changes occurred at a socio-cultural level; - PUBLICATION OF AN INNOVATIVE RESOURCE which fills a gap in the existing electronic resources for the linguistic study of Italian: a diachronic, pragmatically annotated corpus that will be publicly available to the scientific community, and that is incrementally expandable even after the end of the project. The pursuit of the project’s objectives will lead to an advancement of knowledge, filling a twofold gap, concerning (i) the linguistic history of Italian and (ii) diachronic pragmatics at the inter-linguistic level, since if it is true that there are valuable contributions on specific pragmatic phenomena, there is still a lack of a wide-ranging diachronic study on Italian, one that is based on a systemic approach and can be an object of comparison with other languages in the dynamic field of historical pragmatics at the international level.