An Open Diachronic Dataset of Requests in Italian: Annotation, Challenges and a Case Study

Chiara Fedriani; Francesca Strik-Lievers

doi:10.5334/johd.541

An Open Diachronic Dataset of Requests in Italian: Annotation, Challenges and a Case Study

Journal of Open Humanities Data

Volume 12 (2026): Issue 1

By: Chiara Fedriani and Francesca Strik-Lievers

Open Access

|May 2026

Abstract

Strategies for making requests often change over time. Focusing on Italian, we present a diachronic dataset of requests extracted from dialogic interactions in literary texts (e.g. theatre plays) from the 13th to the 20th century. Requests are drawn from the pragmatically annotated diachronic corpus DIADIta and from more recent, contemporary sources, and are further annotated using a fine-grained scheme for pragmalinguistic analyses. We describe the annotation scheme and data curation process, discuss challenges of the pragmatic analysis of historical data, report quantitative results addressing our research question, and outline potential reuse scenarios.

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Articles in this issue

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.541 | Journal eISSN: 2059-481X

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Language: English

Page range: 68 - 68

Submitted on: Mar 20, 2026

Accepted on: Apr 23, 2026

Published on: May 25, 2026

Published by: Ubiquity Press

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

Keywords:

historical pragmatics,

request,

speech act,

politeness,

DIADIta corpus

© 2026 Chiara Fedriani, Francesca Strik-Lievers, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Volume 12 (2026): Issue 1