Comparing lexicons diachronically in Italian literary corpora

Abstract

The goal of the article is to provide a comparison between several words from Florentine vernacular language and modern Italian language, using software written by the author. This paper focuses on two corpora: the first one includes a selection of Florentine vernacular literature and the second one a group of literary books written in a modern Italian language from the end of XIX Century up until the present. The article demonstrates the use of some features of the software to compare the two corpora, ranking the lexicographic entries using different strategies. It is possible to analyse the lexicon taking into consideration different types of sorting, using only three parameters: the word frequency, the percentage of frequency according to the number of words in the corpus, and the percentage of texts where the word is found in the corpus. From these parameters a fourth parameter also arises the level of persistence of words in each corpus. The software allows observing the differences in the use of lexicon in various periods of history, comparing the Florentine vernacular language, which was used in the Italian peninsula till the beginning of XIX Century, to the modern Italian language.