Building a pragmatically annotated diachronic corpus: the DIADIta project

We present here the first stages of the construction of the DIADIta corpus, a diachronic corpus of Italian annotated for interactional pragmatic phenomena. This corpus aims to fill a gap in the resources available for the historical pragmatics of Italian. First, we describe the annotation scheme, which is structured into four levels covering a wide range of pragmatic (or pragmatically relevant) categories: speech acts (e.g., apology; threat), forms (e.g., discourse marker; expressive), pragmatic functions (which are speaker-oriented, e.g., mitigation; turn-taking), and pragmatic aims (which are interlocutor-oriented, e.g., attention-getting; request for agreement). We then discuss how the results of an initial annotation exercise provide insights for refining the annotation procedure.