Syntax and Semantics of Italian Poetry in the First Half of the 20th Century
This work addresses the challenge of computationally analyzing complex poetic language for linguists and computational linguistics researchers, though it is incremental in applying existing theories to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the analysis of rhetorical figures in early 20th-century Italian poetry by representing them as noncanonical syntactic structures and evaluating computational parsing methods, finding that a symbolic rule-based system (Getarun) is superior to statistical parsers for handling these structures.
In this paper we study, analyse and comment rhetorical figures present in some of most interesting poetry of the first half of the twentieth century. These figures are at first traced back to some famous poet of the past and then compared to classical Latin prose. Linguistic theory is then called in to show how they can be represented in syntactic structures and classified as noncanonical structures, by positioning discontinuous or displaced linguistic elements in Spec XP projections at various levels of constituency. Then we introduce LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar) as the theory that allows us to connect syntactic noncanonical structures with informational structure and psycholinguistic theories for complexity evaluation. We end up with two computational linguistics experiments and then evaluate the results. The first one uses best online parsers of Italian to parse poetic structures; the second one uses Getarun, the system created at Ca Foscari Computational Linguistics Laboratory. As will be shown, the first approach is unable to cope with these structures due to the use of only statistical probabilistic information. On the contrary, the second one, being a symbolic rule based system, is by far superior and allows also to complete both semantic an pragmatic analysis.