Syntax and Semantics of Italian Poetry in the First Half of the 20th Century

In this paper we study, analyse and comment rhetorical figures present in some of most interesting poetry of the first half of the 20 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 SpecXP 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.