Quantitative analysis of Italian texts

The present book can be considered a continuation of two streams in textology initiated by different groups of scholars. The first group consisting of Italian scientists analyzed the 57 end-of-year speeches of 9 Italian presidents since 1949 to 2005 from very different points of view. The investigation resulted in the book edited by M.A. Cortelazzo and A. Tuzzi (2007) containing statistical vistas and political, social, linguistic and cultural matter. The second group, lead by I.-I. Popescu consisting of linguists and mathematicians, focused on general aspects associated with texts, namely text characterization, fixed points, vocabulary richness, thematic concentration, compactness, study of autosemantics, the impact of the position in sentence; this group also focused on the possibility of drawing conclusions from text to the morphology of language, etc. This investigation resulted in two books authored by I.-I. Popescu et al. (2009) and I.-I. Popescu, J. Mačutek and G. Altmann (2009). The present book is a further development of methods and fully concentrated on the end-of-year addresses of Italian presidents. Moreover, the updated version of the corpus includes 60 end-of-year speeches of 10 presidents since 1949 to 2008. The aim was to look at the highest floor of the linguistically perceived reality, namely the sets of word associations, compare these worlds and pursue a possible development in this thematically homogeneous corpus. The book includes chapters concerning the golden section, Zipf´s law, parts-of-speech analysis and some issues concerning vocabulary richness,continuing the examinations resulting from earlier common publications.