Concordanze della Lingua Poetica Italiana delle Origini (Concordances of the Italian Poetic Language of Origins - CLPIO)

The project Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (CLPIO), inaugurated by d'Arco Silvio Avalle in the 1970s, coordinated by Professor Lino Leonardi, and then continued with the collaboration of the Accademia della Crusca, gave birth to a first volume published by Ricciardi (1992), which supported the project since its early stages. The first goal of the research, that is the constitution of the corpus from scratch, has been achieved thanks to this volume with a new critical edition, based on each manuscript, of all Italian poetry transcribed in codices previous to the beginning of 1300.
The resulting corpus, that represents an important contribution to Italian philology, meets the requirements of the most up to date lexicography: the completeness of the testimonies within a limited period of time, absolute respect for the “textual truth” of each single coeval manuscript, and accuracy for what concerns the graphic page layout (also for data processing purposes).
The first volume already shows the basis for the following work of concordances preparation: apart from the significant Introduction , that lays the groundwork for the study of the poetic language of Origins, the complete list of homophones gives a first sample of how the linguistic material is organized. On these bases, in 1993, the complete lemmatization of the corpus started, with the work of a specific editorial group.
The final goal of this project, considering the recent progress of computer science applied to linguistics, has changed in the meantime: the volumes with concordances are not expected to be published any more, but the lemmatized corpus will be digitalized in a CD-ROM.
Such a decision will make the CLPIO a useful and effective tool for the study of our origins, as the software, without omitting statistic analysis, will allow an optimal search of concordances (by forms and lemmas) and a rigorous identification of co-occurrences (phrases and idiomatic expressions) and also a list of rhyming words and, above all, the possibility of a parallel comparison among texts, both for philological purposes, on the basis of a linguistic analysis of the varia lectio of a specific work, and for a more intertextual, purpose by identifying the references and hints among different texts.
A special place will include many clarificatory notes about the least clear excerpts. For such a purpose, Eugenio Picchi, with the help of Elisabetta Marinai, is working on a specific version of the DBT software.
The same CD-Rom is also expected to provide the unabridged reproduction of all manuscripts edited in the corpus, in black and white or in full colour, linking the pages with the texts they transmit.