Building a pragmatically annotated diachronic corpus: the DIADIta project
Authors: Irene De Felice, Francesca Strik-Lievers (Università del Piemonte Orientale, Università di Genova, 2024)
Topic: Multimodal

Abstract
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.

Introduction
The DIADIta project1, situated within the framework of historical pragmatics [1], aims to investigate the specific pragmatic features and strategies of dialogic interaction in different phases of the Italian language, and to understand how these features and strategies interrelate with one another and change over time. Although the last fifteen years have witnessed a growing interest in the historical pragmatics of Italian [2], there is still a lack of an in-depth study on this topic, one that is able to fully account for how different communicative strategies and different linguistic categories (primarily, but not exclusively, pragmatic) interact with each other, both in synchronic and diachronic perspective. The DIADIta project aims to address this gap. A key goal of the project is to build a diachronic corpus annotated for a wide range of pragmatically relevant linguistic phenomena. The DIADIta corpus, which will contribute to the recently established field of diachronic corpus pragmatics [3], will consist of at least 24 Italian literary texts of different genres dating from the 13th to the 20th century: in most cases, plays, novels and short stories where dialogic interactions between characters are particularly frequent. Once completed, the corpus will be freely accessible and searchable from the project website (www.diadita.it) and will be possibly further expanded and enriched with other texts of different literary genres. In this paper, we present the first steps we have taken to lay the foundation for the DIADIta corpus. After a brief review of related literature and resources (Section 2), we describe the structure of the annotation scheme, outlining the theoretical and methodological assumptions that underlie it and highlighting its most innovative aspects (Section 3). Then, we present the results of an annotation exercise on a play by Luigi Pirandello, with which we tested the reliability of the scheme. In the light of these results, we also briefly discuss some improvements that we plan to apply in the next stages of the corpus annotation process (Section 4). The last section draws the conclusions of the study (Section 5).

Conclusion
This paper has outlined the initial steps in creating the DIADIta corpus, a pragmatically annotated diachronic corpus for Italian. This corpus is characterized by its rich, multi-layered annotation scheme organized into four dimensions: forms, pragmatic functions, pragmatic aims, speech acts. This structure allows for nuanced analysis of pragmatic strategies in literary texts from the 13th to the 20th century. The innovative approach of annotating complex interactional features highlights the value of this corpus as an unparalleled tool for examining the evolution of pragmatic functions and forms over time, enabling detailed and multi-dimensional analysis of text data. We have also detailed an annotation exercise on a play by Pirandello that illustrates the task’s complexity (reflected in the low level of agreement in some layers), but also the richness of the annotations. This first exercise is crucial for refining the annotation process and improving clarity and reliability in applying a pragmatic annotation model to historical texts.