On the Sources of Spoken (Italian) Language in a Historical Perspective

Abstract

In this paper, we research the importance of corpora in historical pragmatics. From the origins of historical pragmatics as a science the question of choosing an appropriate corpus has been in the center of attention. The problematics of historical pragmatics demand a corpus that reflects faithfully the spoken language. However, such registered sources do not exist. Thus, researchers face problems when choosing corpora that have to be written but also reflect speech. That is why we synthesize a review of often-used corpora and we present their advantages and disadvantages. We apply the theory of Giovanni Nencioni (1976) that differs between the spoken language in the true meaning of the word (parlato parlato), written spoken language (parlato scritto), and recited spoken language (parlato recitato). Based on his research, we can claim that some of the privileged forms in historical pragmatics are literary works, theater pieces, religious scriptures, and speech transcripts. Thus, we examine the advantages and disadvantages of the aforementioned corpora and we aim to determine if they are suitable to be used in historical pragmatics. The research shows that it is impossible to find a completely adequate corpus because none of them reflect the spoken language in all of its characteristics and they approach it only partially.

Keywords

• historical pragmatics
• corpora
• sources
• the “bad data“ problem
• spoken language