MEMORATA POETIS

Type of project: National  |  Start date: 01/02/2013  |  End date: 31/01/2016

We aim at creating and providing the scientific community with a search engine which is lexical as well as multilingual, semantic and thematic, and selective according to ages, linguistic trends, regional and local differences, social and cultural origins and destinations. Such a search engine will firstly be functional to the study of poetic inscriptions, whatever their provenance, age, genre and type may be, with relation to the ‘high’ literary genres (lyric, elegy and so on) influencing those inscriptions or influenced by them (starting from epitaphs or self-epitaphs by archaic authors); and with relation to Greek and Latin, classical and post-classical, Christian and medieval epigrams, starting from a stylistic level to all the philosophical, religious and widely ideological inclinations shown within the historic development and the linguistic evolution, with the transition into Vulgar Italian and its new ‘short’ poetic forms.

Tasks of ILC Research Unit

The research unit aims to perform linguistic analyses of the epigraphical and literary corpora in Greek and Latin prepared by the central unit of Venice. Statistical methods for the exploration of texts will be developed and, finally, the digital corpus will be enriched with a small amount of inscriptions and a larger amount of poems in Arabic language. The Arabic corpus will constitute the control group to evaluate the intertextual relations between Greek and Latin texts, assuming the independence of the Arabic poetry from the Greek and Latin ones.