Linguistic-cultural Heritage & Digital Humanities

This project aims at creating a corpus of texts belonging to various genres (e.g. legal texts), coming from different Chinese-speaking territorial entities (e.g. Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore) with a focus on their foreign relations.
Qualitative and quantitative analyses will be carried out with the assistance of digital tools.
We also intend to start collaborations with scholars affiliated to other institutions.

Expected results

Creating a corpus, analysing it and carrying out dissemination activities of our research findings.

This project aims at developing tools for the dissemination of specialized Chinese culture as well as for the training and promotion of research and knowledge transmission. This is done with an eye to making such tools accessible and potentially usable by an increasingly wide audience, including the general public.

Expected results

Scientific and specialised materials, e.g. articles, essays and glossaries for various purposes, including scientific research, divulgation and teaching activities.

TaLitE (Traveling and Living in the East) studies not only tourist texts/traveling literature including diaries and guides, published in English but focusing on China. The study is based on printed materials published between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, as well as digital materials pertaining to the contemporary era.

The study is aimed at unveiling the evolution of China perception by western travellers, its stereotypes and the characteristics of the text types examined even from a diachronic perspective.

The methodology draws on corpus linguistic tools for both quantitative and qualitative analyses, and includes keywords, collocations as well as discourse analysis.

Expected Results

The results of the analysis will enable us to identify how the perception of “the other” varied in the last century. A corpus will be created and the research results will be published in scientific journals.

Publications

• Franceschi, V. 2022. “‘The Chinese as I Have Seen Them’: A Diachronic Analysis of Western Perception on the Chinese in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries”. Linguaculture, 13(2): 13-34. https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2022-2-0307
• Franceschi, V. 2022. “’A very gay city, also a beautiful one’: The role of attitude markers in early travel guidebooks to China.” Lingue e Linguaggi 53: 157-172. https://doi.org/10.1285/i22390359v53p157
• Franceschi, V. 2021. “China as an International Travel Destination: A Corpus-based Analysis of Online Travel Blogs.” Iperstoria 18: 86-107. http://dx.doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2021.i18.1038
• Franceschi, V. and S. Hartle (eds.) 2021. Iperstoria 18 - Tourism Discourse in the 21st Century: Challenges and New Directions. Iperstoria 18. https://iperstoria.it/issue/view/44
• Franceschi, V. and S. Hartle. 2021. “Introduction to ‘Tourism Discourse in the 21st Century: Challenges and New Directions’” Iperstoria 18: 1-9. https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2021.i18.1120

This line of research within the Excellence Initiative aims at studying the cultural and linguistic contacts between the East and the West, that is, between France and Spanish-speaking countries on the one hand, and the East, particularly China, on the other.
The research is based on the construction of a corpus of texts written between the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. This time frame coincides with a historical period of special significance for the cultural, commercial and political relationships between those two macro areas.
The corpus dataset includes different text types, such as press articles and international politics essays. The construction of the corpus has undergone various phases, which include the selection and classification of data, their processing and storing, as well as the subsequent tagging and analysis of the corpus.

The main objective of the research is to build the corpus and to analyse some linguistic aspects that emerge from the contacts examined along with the study of the perception of China in France and Spanish-speaking countries in a contrastive perspective.

Expected results

The online platform will allow to query the corpus and will offer a representation of the acquired data.

The VinKo project consists of an online platform with questionnaires on morphology, syntax and phonology and is aimed at collecting linguistic data from Romance and Germanic non-standard speech varieties in Trentino/South Tyrol and Veneto (and some language islands in Friuli). VinKo makes use of online crowd-sourcing in order to reach as many participants as possible and to collect data from a wide range of localities across the regions. Participants can contribute to the project by registering on the VinKo website and recording their own responses using the built-in microphone of the platform. There is a variety of tasks on the page - e.g., translations from Italian/German into their local speech variety, the description of pictures and conversations, the pronunciation of single-word dialect items - which the participants are asked to complete. The recordings are collected and stored in the online database which serves as a corpus for both the researchers and the speech community members of the involved linguistic varieties. Furthermore, a selection of the recordings is visualized on the open-access section of the webpage through an interactive map (GIS), which can be used by participants and anyone interested in exploring the collected data and learning more about the multilingual environment of the Trentino/South Tyrol and Veneto regions. The full corpus can be downloaded from the repository of the Eurac Research Clarin Centre (ERCC):

VinKo (Varieties in Contact) Corpus: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12124/32

The project has two main objectives. The first is to provide a detailed description of linguistic microvariation in the area and the linguistic influences existing in phonology, morphology and syntax between the Germanic and Romance varieties, and to formulate generalizations which are valid for the general theory of language contact. The second objective is to increase the knowledge of widespread multilingualism in the area and the awareness of local languages which are a crucial part of the cultural heritage as it merits safeguarding and refinement. In this respect, an important integration is constituted by the VinKiamo subproject, a PCTO activity developed in collaboration with the Regional School Office for Veneto, in which the students from upper secondary schools are trained and act as research assistants within their local communities, also promoting the intergenerational dialogue with elderly speakers of the local speech varieties.

VinKiamo: https://sites.hss.univr.it/vinkiamo

The research is realized in collaboration with researchers at the Universities of Trento and Bolzano.

Project page: https://www.vinko.it/

Contact: vinko@ateneo.univr.it

Expected result

The analysis of the data will serve to confirm what is already known about language contact and its effects on language change and to extend the existing generalizations to other varieties which up until now have been less-studied from a contact point of view. The promotion of the open-access archive of the speech recordings will contribute to more widespread knowledge of the linguistic and cultural wealth of the regions. Previous studies have demonstrated that digital resources have substantially contributed to preserving and revitalizing endangered languages.

PolDisc (Political Discourse) focuses on political discourse and is articulated on the contrastive study of the language used in the USA, the UK and in Italy from a text linguistic and semantico-pragmatic perspective, including the lexicon employed in public speeches and in social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) posts, with special reference to populist discourse at an international level.

A corpus-based methodology is used, while from a theoretical point of view the project is based on the principles of text linguistics (Beaugrande and Dressler 1981), Critical Discourse Analysis (Van Dijk 1993) and the discourse-historical approach (Wodak 2015).

The goal of the research is to shed light on the discursive strategies of both right-wing and left-wing populist discourse from a contrastive perspective and through multiple semiotic systems.

Expected Results

The expected results include the creation of a corpus and the study of the phenomena analysed in scientific publications.

Publications

• Lorenzetti M. I. 2024. “Sexism in Right-Wing Populist Online Discourse in Italy and the US: A Contrastive Analysis” in Annalisa Baicchi and Cristiano Broccias (eds.) Constructional and Cognitive Explorations of Contrastive Linguistics. New York: Springer. 215-237. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46602-1_11
• Lorenzetti M. I. 2022. “Dramatising Crisis. Rhetorical Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic by Right-Wing Populist Leaders in the USA and UK.” Lingue e Linguaggi 47: 13-45. DOI 10.1285/i22390359v47p13
• Lorenzetti M. I. and E. Mattei. 2022. “People-building Strategies in Trump’s and Biden’s Political Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis between Populism and Anti-Populism.” Iperstoria 20: 351-382. https://dx.doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2022.i20.1233
• Lorenzetti M. I. 2022. “A Corpus-Assisted Contrastive Investigation of Migration-related Terms in British and Italian Political Discourse” Iperstoria 19: 236-267. https://dx.doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2022.i19.1173
• Lorenzetti M. I. 2020. “Anti-Immigration Rhetoric in Italy and in the USA: A Comparative Perspective” in Massimiliano Demata and Marco Mariano (eds.) Euro-American Relations in the Age of Globalization: Risks and Opportunities – Special Issue of De Europa 2020, Collane@unito.it, Torino. 97-121.
• Demata M. and M. I. Lorenzetti (eds.) (2020) Iperstoria 15 – Special Section “Populism and Its Languages” (https://iperstoria.it/issue/view/14)
• Demata M. and Lorenzetti M. I. (2020) “Introduction” in Massimiliano Demata and M. I. Lorenzetti (eds.) Iperstoria 15 – Special Section “Populism and Its Languages”: 1-7. https://dx.doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2020.i15.727
• Lorenzetti M. I. 2020. “Right-Wing Populism and the Representation of Immigrants on Social Media: A Critical Multimodal Analysis” Iperstoria 15: 59-95. https://dx.doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2020.i15.666
• Lorenzetti M. I. 2018. “A Cross-linguistic Study of New Populist Language” in Michael Kranert and Geraldine Horan (eds.) Doing Politics. Discursivity, Performativity and Mediation in Political Discourse. John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam. 153-177. https://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.80.07lor

The InterDiplo project focuses on the language used in spoken interactions by diplomats, ambassadors, and international relations, a topic which has hitherto attracted little attention.

A key aim of the project is to compile a corpus (the InterDiplo Corpus), which comprises broadcast interviews and debates where diplomats and international operators are interviewed in English by journalists of differing cultural backgrounds. This will ensure the suitability of the corpus for both sociolinguistic and intercultural studies.

The topics of the interviews and debates cover a variety of subject fields – including health, politics, society, and the environment.

The corpus is being tagged for metadata, parts of speech, pragmatic and discursive elements, in order to analyse lexico-grammatical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics as well as the discursive strategies of the interlocutors.

As part of the project a pilot corpus (InterDiploCovid-19 corpus) is also currently under development, the main aim of which is to pilot both the tagging system and our research hypotheses.

Another key aspect of the project is that a joint research project has also been set up between the Verona team and the University of Konstanz (Dr Annette Hautli-Janisz).

Expected results

The data yielded by the corpus will lead to scientific publications to share with the academic community, as well as teaching materials for prospective/in-service journalists, diplomats and international relations officers.

As of now, two corpora have stemmed from the project:

1. InterDiplo Covid-19 corpus
   The corpus consists of 80 transcriptions of English-language broadcast interviews concerning Covid-19 pandemic and its social, economic and political issues conducted from February 2020 to February 2021, for a total of 236,000 tokens. The interviews are further categorized according to the speakers’ native language status:
   • 20 interviews in which the interviewer and the interviewee are both native speakers of English;
   • 20 interviews in which the interviewer is a native speaker of English whereas the interviewee is a non-native speaker of English
   • 20 interviews in which the interviewer is a non-native speaker of English whereas the interviewee is a native speaker of English
   • 20 interviews in which the interviewer and the interviewee are both non-native speakers of English
2. InterDiplo Journalists-Diplomats corpus: 80 texts
   The corpus consists of 80 transcriptions of English-language broadcast interviews on a variety of subject fields conducted between 2020 and 2022, for a total of 159,888 tokens. The interviews involve journalists and diplomats from different linguacultural backgrounds.
   Out of these 80 interviews, 40 are video-mediated and 40 are face-to-face; within these two categories, 20 female and 20 male journalists are represented.

The transcriptions of both corpora are annotated in xml following a customized schema that includes major paralinguistic features as well as questions and answers.

Utilizing InterDiplo, the project of PhD student Hunter Youngquist aims to analyze the effects of presuppositions in journalist interview questions by integrating typical annotation techniques with the support of large language models to automatically extract these pragmatic inferences. This work will provide insights into both the techniques adopted by journalist interviewers to balance neutralism and the future role of A.I. in annotation.

Publications

• Forth. – Facchinetti R. Forth. “Interviewing AI: A new challenge for discourse analysis in the neural age”, in S. Maci (ed.) AI: Challenges and potentialities. A Discourse Analysis Perspective, Cambridge Scholars Publishers: Newcastle upon Tyne;
• Forth. – Facchinetti R. Forth. “Striking a balance between norms of impartiality and subjectivity in broadcast interviews: A case study”, Token, Special issue ed. by Christina Samson and Elisabetta Cecconi;
• Cavalieri S. and R. Facchinetti Forth. “Neutrality in news interviews: an open question”, in ESP across cultures, special issue ed by B. Crawford Camiciottoli and O. Denti.
• Corrizzato S. and V. Franceschi. Forth. “Transparency and ambiguity in diplomatic discourse to the wider public: an analysis of hedging and boosting in media interviews” in ESP across cultures, special issue ed by B. Crawford Camiciottoli and O. Denti.
• Facchinetti R. 2023. “Oppositional discourse in the digital transformation: A contrastive analysis between face-to-face and video-mediated interviews in English”, Lingue e Linguaggi 58, Special issue ed. by M. Bondi – S. Cacchiani Positioning, point of view and ideology in the digital transformation. 23-42. DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v58p23
• Cavalieri S., S. Corrizzato, R. Facchinetti, 2022. “The Research- Practice Interface in ESP and the Challenges for Linguists in the Digital Era: The Case of the InterDiplo Corpus”. In: Ersilia Incelli, Renzo Mocini, Judith Turnbull (eds.) The Research-Practice Interface in English for Specific Purposes. Past, Present and Future. Cambridge Scholars Publishers: Newcastle upon Tyne. 190-205
• Cavalieri, S., S. Corrizzato. 2022. ““But you think they’re qualified I assume”: a comparative analysis of hypothetical questions in the InterDiplo Covid-19 Corpus”, Expressio 6: 131-150.

This project aims at creating a corpus of Chinese legal texts coming from different Chinese-speaking territorial entities (e.g. Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore) and analysing them qualitatively and quantitatively by means of digital tools. The research focuses on Chinese legal language and its features, both as a language for special purposes (LSP) and as discourse.
We also intend to start collaborations with scholars affiliated to other institutions.

Expected results

Creating a corpus, analysing it and carrying out dissemination activities of our research findings.

DIACOM belongs to the linguistic area of our Excellence Project, i.e. languages for specific purposes. This sub-project deals with the diachronic study of trade terminology in French and Spanish.

This study is based on the creation of a specialized corpus according to three main criteria. A chronological criterion, according to which the corpus subdivision follows three key steps for the evolution of trade on an international level: the periods 1850-1914 and 1945-1970 for both languages; as regards the recent history of trade, the period 1990-2018 for Spanish and 1985-2020 for French. We have also adopted an extra-linguistic criterion, which allows the trade field to be classified into sub-fields, and a textual criterion, on the basis of which texts of different types are collected and filed. The implementation of the corpus is followed by the phases of filing, pre-editing, archiving, tagging and corpus analysis, with the subsequent creation of accessible resources for our online platform.

Taking the corpus as a reference point, the main objective of DIACOM is the analysis of trading terminology in the two languages, both in their evolution across time and in a specific historical moment. For example, the phenomena of phraseology, definitions and the diachronic evolution of key terms in the sector are examined and results are published in scientific publications. The corpus will also represent a teaching resource available to both UNIVR students and any external users.

Expected results

Software will be used for the automatic extraction of terminological data and for the processing and display of data on the online platform. This platform will allow access to concordances and contexts extracted from the corpus and will host a database of terms in the form of a network.

NEOTUR is part of the Linguistic Area of our Project of Excellence. More specifically, our project intends to study neology and terminology in contemporary French for tourism.
With this purpose, we aim to build a French language corpus relating to tourism. The corpus texts cover the period from 2000 to 2020 and belong to different text types, including specialized press, academic papers and institutional texts. The implementation of the corpus is followed by the phases of filing, pre-editing, archiving, tagging and corpus analysis, with the subsequent creation of accessible resources for our online platform.

The main objective of this research is to record and examine the frequency and evolution of neologisms and terms in the field of tourism through the use of IT tools. In particular, we intend to focus on word-formation, phraseology and the definition of terms.

Expected results

Through an online platform it will be possible to carry out linguistic research and extract concordances, contexts and other linguistic data from the corpus. Furthermore, a database of terms will be created in the form of a network.