Combinare analisi ritmica e sintattica: un esperimento con TRIARS sulla Commedia di Dante
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/14917
 L’obiettivo del saggio è di illustrare un nuovo strumento informatico appositamente creato per permettere uno studio della terza rima dal duplice punto di vista ritmico e sintattico. Il fine è quello di ricercare e analizzare identiche strutture ritmico-sintattiche in diverse terzine, osservandone l'utilizzo nelle varie restrizioni imposte dal metro. Lo strumento, denominato TRIARS, è ancora allo stadio di prototipo e, attualmente, è stato testato solo sulla Commedia. Il saggio è inaugurato da una breve panoramica sul progetto di ricerca che ha poi portato alla creazione di TRIARS; nella sezione 2, vengono illustrate le più importanti teorie scientifiche che sono alla base del progetto; in seguito, la sezione 3 ripercorre i passi principali che hanno portato allo sviluppo della prima versione dello strumento in questione; la sezione 4, invece, contiene una descrizione dettagliata delle funzioni di TRIARS, dalla cui lettura emergono già alcune delle imperfezioni che ancora lo caratterizzano e che sono analizzate nella sezione 6; la sezione 7, inoltre, si focalizza sull’obiettivo finale della ricerca e mostra un breve esempio di analisi comparata tra la Commedia e altre opere in terza rima, come la Caccia di Diana di Giovanni Boccaccio e i Trionfi di Petrarca; infine, chiudono il saggio delle considerazioni generali sulla ricerca.
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Umanistica Digitale
Third Rhyme
Combining rhythmical and syntactical analysis: an experiment on Dante’s Comedy with the new tool TRIARS
Text.Serial.Journal
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/
Articles
2022-10-21
2022-05-19
2022-10-21
2022-10-21
49-69
Um. Dig.
Ugo Conti
2022/10/21
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/14917
49
University of Florence
2532-8816
13
Third Rhyme
en
69
Combining rhythmical and syntactical analysis: an experiment on Dante’s Comedy with the new tool TRIARS
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/14917/14748
Umanistica Digitale – ISSN: 2532-8816 – n. 13, 2022
U. Conti – Combining rhythmic and syntactic analysis: an experiment on Dante’s Comedy with
the new tool TRIARS
DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/14917



 Combining rhythmic and syntactic analysis: an experiment
     on Dante’s Comedy with the new tool TRIARS

                                            Ugo Conti

                                Università di Firenze, Florence, Italy
                                      ugo.conti@unifi.it




       Abstract

is paper is meant to introduce a speciﬁcally designed tool for the purpose of combining
rhythmic and syntactic data to analyse literary works written in third rhyme and to look for
identical rhythmical-syntactical structures in diﬀerent tercets, ﬁnally studying their use in the
many restrictions imposed by meter and its rules. TRIARS is still in its preliminary stage, and it
has only been tested on Dante's Comedy.
 L’obiettivo del saggio è di illustrare un nuovo strumento informatico appositamente creato per
permettere uno studio della terza rima dal duplice punto di vista ritmico e sintattico. Il ﬁne è
quello di ricercare e analizzare identiche strutture ritmico-sintattiche in diverse terzine,
osservandone l'utilizzo nelle varie restrizioni imposte dal metro. Lo strumento,
denominato TRIARS, è ancora allo stadio di prototipo e, attualmente, è stato testato solo sulla
Commedia.



       1. Introduction

Dante’s Comedy has been driving an ever-growing interest over the past decades, especially in
recent years considering the upcoming seven hundredth anniversary in 2021. Concerning this
paper, the last two decades have been crucial to the research on Dante’s works: several
important and computer-based projects aimed at analysing all the diﬀerent aspects of the poet’s
works, among which a special mention needs to be made about those tools, such as
DanteSearch and the Archivio Metrico Italiano (AMI), essential to the analysis of Dante’s style
from more than one perspective.
Having mentioned DanteSearch and AMI, the two main points on which the paper will focus,
syntax and rhythm, are already deﬁned. Both these aspects have been studied for years without
the help of computers and an impressive amount of data and new ideas concerning Dante’s
style have already been achieved and available; nonetheless, it is indeed possible to make a

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further advancement in this direction with the help of digital humanities. Besides DanteSearch
and AMI, many studies were already heading in this direction, such as [18], with a deep and
accurate analysis of Dante’s syntax and rhythm and a special attention to the Comedy, but no
eﬀorts have been made to deﬁne a tool that could explore both these aspects together.
However, since syntax and rhythm are inextricably intertwined and therefore always
inﬂuencing each other, an analysis focused on both these aspects is crucial to a fuller
understanding of Dante’s style.
is paper is meant to introduce TRIARS (Terza Rima Informatizzata per l’Analisi Ritmica e
Sintattica), a speciﬁcally designed tool for the purpose of combining rhythmic and syntactic
data to analyse literary works written in third rhyme and to look for identical structures in
diﬀerent tercets, ﬁnally studying their use in the many restrictions imposed by meter and its
rules. e ﬁrst results of this research, which began with the analysis of Dante’s Comedy, have
already been published on several occasions and are part of a Ph.D. project that led to the
creation of TRIARS and to an introductory analysis of the whole Comedy, in order to conﬁrm
the truth of its theoretical basis and the mere feasibility of such an analysis [9]. As a matter of
fact, although it generated these ﬁrst and promising results ([8]; [10]), the tool itself is still
preliminary and, as the paper will show, it needs to be improved and redeﬁned. In these
regards, the introduction and a detailed discussion of its features and main issues is a necessary
step towards a deﬁnite version of TRIARS.
e paper is structured as follows: in Section 2, the main studies and scientiﬁc basis from the
original project are reviewed; Section 3 reports the most important steps in the development of
the early version of TRIARS; in Section 4, all the features and functionalities of TRIARS are
described in detail; Section 5 outlines the major ﬂaws and weaknesses of the current version of
TRIARS, whilst all the essential ideas of improvement are examined; additionally, Section 7
focuses on the ﬁnal purpose of the research, showing a brief example of compared analysis on
the Comedy and other diﬀerent poems in third rhyme, such as the Caccia di Diana by Giovanni
Boccaccio and the Trionﬁ by Francesco Petrarca; ﬁnally, general conclusions are reported in
Section 8.



        2. Related works

e main inspiration for TRIARS, like many other stylistic studies and projects about Dante’s
Comedy, is the paper originally written by Gianfranco Contini in 1965, Un’interpretazione di
Dante [11]. Contini had the unquestionable merit of leading the way on interpreting a new
perspective on Dante’s studies, which is a valid starting point even for today’s research; as a
matter of fact, he described the way in which Dante’s memory works, stating that it is not
“puramente verbale, per eccitazioni provenienti da oggetti aﬃni, ma si organizza in ﬁgure
ritmiche” and thus introducing the concept of “ﬁgura ritmica” in this research ﬁeld.1



1    For an English translation see [12]: “[Dante’s memory] is not purely verbal, functioning through
    stimuli from similar objects; rather, it is organized by rhythmic ﬁgures".

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Within just a few years the ﬁrst concrete results of this inﬂuence on Dante’s studies emerged:
during the early Seventies, other works about Dante’s style were published: Ritmo e modelli
ritmici by Pier Marco Bertinetto [5] and two papers by Pietro Beltrami ([2]; [3]). Both these
studies were crucial to gather together what have been deﬁned as “echi di Dante entro Dante”
by Contini and resulting in the ﬁrst analysis of Dante’s “sintagmi ritmici” in the Comedy;
particular mention needs to be made about Bertinetto’s work, which was undoubtedly
innovative at the time, because it involved the use of a 360/44 IBM computer to assign the
rhythmic ictuses in a semi-automatic way to Dante’s hendecasyllables.
Another work that was heavily inﬂuenced by Gianfranco Contini’s ideas is L’autonomia del
signiﬁcante by Gian Luigi Beccaria [2], where the relevance of any correlation between signiﬁed
and signiﬁer is heavily contested. is work oﬀers a focal point for all stylistic studies up to
present day, though it has been downsized for its inﬂexibility. Nonetheless, Beccaria’s pages
suggest many paths towards the analysis of Dante’s “memoria ritmica”, with the extra value of
keeping the third rhyme’s “grande ritmo” as a focal point together with the “piccolo ritmo” of
the hendecasyllable. As these pages will show, this is one of the main concerns of this paper,
since the Comedy is only a testing ground for a general theory on the analysis of the third
rhyme, which for this reason is the key to the entire research.
Other important contributions have more recently been brought to Dante’s stylistic studies,
ones that hark to the above-mentioned works. Generally speaking, since it is mostly dedicated
to Boiardo’s poetry [15], the early works of Marco Praloran have been heavily inﬂuenced by
this perspective, and by the dawn of the new century, together with Arnaldo Soldani and the
Gruppo Padovano di Stilistica, they have led to the foundation of the Archivio Metrico
Italiano,2 whose ﬁrst result was a book about Petrarca’s verse [16]. e AMI project started a
wide analysis of early Italian poetry, from Giacomo da Lentini to Torquato Tasso’s verses,
which resulted in a database where all these poets’ versiﬁcation has been catalogued from
diﬀerent perspectives: metrical form, type of verses adopted, irregularities in the versiﬁcation
and, most importantly for this paper, rhythm. As Section 7 will show, one of the most relevant
aspects that links this research to the Archivio Metrico Italiano rhythmic analysis is that a set of
detailed and exact rules has been outlined to assure a homogeneous accentuation of Italian
verses from all the archived poems and, more importantly, to prepare guidelines for the
community of researchers that can provide equally homogeneous rhythmic analysis to the
original database [17].
Moreover, together with the data from the Archivio Metrico Italiano, the other fundamental
tool for TRIARS is the database DanteSearch, a project supervised by Mirko Tavoni, which
consists in the lemmatization and grammatical analysis of all Dante’s works, and also in the
syntactic annotation of Convivio, Rime and Comedy.3 e database allows the users to query the
mentioned works on a morphological and syntactic level, but the most relevant aspect for this



2   http://www.maldura.unipd.it/ami/php/index.php. e database is currently under a redesigning
    process and it has been temporarily deactivated.
3    http://www.perunaenciclopediadantescadigitale.eu:8080/dantesearch/.

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research is, of course, the syntactic annotation of Dante’s Comedy, ideated and encoded in
XML-TEI4 by Sara Gigli for her Ph.D. dissertation [13].
As the next Section will show more in detail, both these projects have been crucial to the
realization of the ﬁrst and preliminary experiments with TRIARS. In the next pages we are
going to review its main features and its major ﬂaws, with the purpose of highlighting its
potential in relation to the analysis of the Italian third rhyme. Before that, a few notes on the
development of the tool are necessary.



       3. Developing TRIARS

As mentioned above, TRIARS stands for Terza Rima Informatizzata per l’Analisi Ritmica e
Sintattica, so it is clear that the main point of the whole project is a more general analysis of the
third rhyme as a structure of the Italian poetry: the aim of this research is not the single
hendecasyllables, but the “grande ritmo” of its meter. Hence, Dante’s Comedy is not the only
work that is important to the project, even though the whole theoretical basis have been laid on
Dante’s third rhyme. e reason of this choice is obvious: having had the opportunity to
repurpose data from already existing projects that were focused on both the main aspects
considered by the research at issue, Dante’s poem was a forced, but indeed very welcome,
choice as a testing ground for a study on the third rhyme. In fact, this decision is also well
integrated with the common practice brought on since the ﬁrst studies after the publication of
Contini’s Un’interpretazione di Dante, in which the Comedy was indicated as a privileged
testing ground for experimenting new theories about Italian’s poetry stylistic aspects.
e development of TRIARS has been entirely entrusted to the Laboratorio di Informatica
Umanistica of the Literature and Philosophy Department of the University of Florence,5 with
the collaboration of dr. Giovanni Salucci and his progettinrete,6 who have already been active on
several occasions in the digital humanities.
From a technical point of view, the web interface and the database have been created by using
the web application ASP.NET Core MVC, a framework for the realization of web apps and API
with a MVC (Model-View-Controller) conceptual scheme. e web interface, moreover, has
been written in HTML5 and CSS3, while TRIARS' search engine uses the database MS SQL-
Server; ﬁnally, both the search engine and the web interface have been realized with the
platform WCM (Web Content Manager) powered by the already mentioned progettinrete and
speciﬁcally designed for academic scientiﬁc projects involving the Digital Humanities.7


4    e TEI-XML encodings of DanteSearch’s are compliant with the P5 version of the TEI Guidelines,
    published in 2007 and continuously updated: http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/.
5   e oﬃcial page of the Laboratorio di Informatica Umanistica is the following:
    https://www.liu.uniﬁ.it/index.html.
6   e home page of progettinrete may be reached at: http://www.progettinrete.it.
7   e oﬃcial page of the WCM can be found here: https://www.wcm.it/.

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  U. Conti – Combining rhythmic and syntactic analysis: an experiment on Dante’s Comedy with
                                                                         the new tool TRIARS


Concerning the data from the Archivio Metrico Italiano, to build the database for TRIARS no
adjustments were necessary: as already mentioned, one of the strongest points of the AMI is
that its guidelines are clear and detailed, as to ensure that all the rhythmic analysis are
homogeneous, so it has been decided not to intervene on the original accentuation as to be in
line with all other related projects. On the other hand, DanteSearch’s data needed a direct
intervention before it was possible to include it in the new database. Of course, DanteSearch
data is as well thought as the Archivio’s, and, as a matter of fact, no editing work has been done
concerning the theoretical aspects of the syntactic annotation; however, the highly detailed and
in-depth analysis of Dante’s syntax was the ﬁrst impediment to the realization of the actual
database.
e main problem consisted in the nature of DanteSearch itself, which on one hand allows the
user to perform in-depth syntactic queries, but on the other it sometimes causes the parameters
to hide the very same results that are expected to be found by TRIARS, a tool that does not
proﬁt of all the distinctions established by Sara Gigli’s analysis. To provide an example, in Inf.,
XXIX 91-3 and Inf., XXX 79-81, the mere attribute of ‘rhetoric’ – assigned to the clause ma che
mi val in Inf., XXX 81, which has been marked up as ‘coordinata avversativa interrogativa di
tipo X retorica’, but not present in the clause ma tu chi sé in Inf., XXIX 93, which has been
marked up as ‘coordinata avversativa interrogativa di tipo X’ –, hides the exact properties that
TRIARS is supposed to be searching:


Inf., XXIX 91-3
“Latin siam noi, che tu vedi sí guasti                   2 4 7 10
qui ambedue”, rispuose l’un piangendo;                   1 4 6 8 10
“ma tu chi sè che di noi dimandasti?”                    2 4 7 10


Inf., XXX 79-81
Dentro c’è l’una già, se l’arrabbiate                    1 4 6 10
ombre che vanno intorno dicon vero;                      1 4 6 8 10
ma che mi val c’ho le membra legate?                     4 7 10


e example here is quite relevant, since a minimal attribute as ‘rhetoric’ is capable of hiding
the identical setting of the interrogative clause in the two tercets, which happen to be in a very
similar rhythmic scheme for both the last hendecasyllables.
Having acknowledged this incompatibility between DanteSearch and TRIARS, the very ﬁrst
step has been to redeﬁne the degree of depth of the syntactic analysis, which on TRIARS is set
to the mere distinction of the macro-type of the clauses. To a better understanding of the kind


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of intervention on the original XML codiﬁcation, we submit the ﬁrst three verses of the
Comedy exactly as they are readable in the original mark-up downloadable from DanteSearch:




As to be more speciﬁc, at the level of this preparatory adjustments, the intervention has been
localized in the deﬁnition of the type attribute, where all the detailed syntactic speciﬁcations
have been simpliﬁed; to provide a more detailed example, attributes, like ‘rel impl lim’, which
stands for ‘relativa implicita limitativa’, or ‘int x’, which stands for ‘interrogativa di tipo X’,
have respectively been reduced to ‘rel’ and ‘int’. It follows that the relevant part of the XML
code has now become:




is work of simpliﬁcation has been carried out for the whole Comedy, thus reducing the
original number of 227 diﬀerent attributes in DanteSearch’s annotation to just 29 [9] and
leaving to the user the task of discerning any further and signiﬁcant syntactic distinctions.
Putting aside the few typos in the original code, no further changes have been performed on
DanteSearch XML codiﬁcation. is way, the theoretical basis behind the analysis have been
accepted indiscriminately, even where the deﬁnition of the syntactic type was interpretable in
diﬀerent ways.



       4. Features and functionalities

As stated above, the current version of TRIARS is not ﬁnal: what is currently in use is a
preliminary version of the tool, whose purpose is to prove whether the theoretical basis is solid
or not, and to test the possibility to perform eﬀective queries under syntactic and rhythmic
restrictions at once. In spite of its temporariness, TRIARS already allows the users to explore its



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                                                                           the new tool TRIARS


features on the Comedy’s text, by reaching it at its homepage;8 to provide a more accurate idea
of its functionalities, a description of its features is needed.
is is the main interface of TRIARS, from which it is possible to perform queries by ﬁlling out
any of the available options:




                                        Figure 1: TRIARS’ Home Page.


e interface allows many research options, both related to syntactic and rhythmic aspects of
the literary works in the database. Of course, any research can be launched by fulﬁlling a single
ﬁeld, but, for every result, the system will still output all the relevant data for the other ﬁelds;
alternatively, all the options can be selected to intertwine the rhythmic and syntactic aspect in a
single research, thus making it ever more extensive. Even though both possibilities still stand on
their own and can be useful in diﬀerent situations, the purpose of TRIARS is to combine two
diﬀerent aspects of poetry’s language, so most of the queries would beneﬁt from the fulﬁlment
of more than one ﬁeld. As a matter of fact, both syntactic and rhythmic research regarding
Dante’s Comedy is already possible with DanteSearch and the Archivio Metrico Italiano, even
though they are not exclusively focused on the third rhyme as a structure; on the other hand,
TRIARS most peculiar side is to allow double research and to avoid the diﬃcult and complex
task to combine manually the results from two diﬀerent databases.
Here’s a detailed description of all the diﬀerent options, with examples of how to ﬁll them:
     1.   e ﬁeld ‘Testo’ allows the user to narrow the results down to a speciﬁc word or
          group of words that can be read in any single hendecasyllable of the database; so, it is

8         http://triars.labdilef.it/.

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         possible to type “vita” to ﬁnd the verse of Inf. I 1 (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra
         vita”) and all the others where the word is mentioned, such as Par. XXVIII 1 (“Poscia
         che ’ncontro a la vita presente”), but it is also possible to type “cammin di nostra vita”
         and round the research down to the ﬁrst verse of the poem only.
    2.   ‘Macrotipo sintattico’ limits the results to the only selected syntactic macro-type, such
         as “dichiarativa” or “ﬁnale”; so, for example, ﬁlling this ﬁeld with the option
         “relativa”, TRIARS will ﬁnd all the hendecasyllables with a relative clause in it,
         regardless of their functions in the sentence.
    3.   ‘Livello di subordinazione’, on the other hand, gives the user the possibility to further
         specify for the syntactic function of a main or subordinate clause, deﬁning its level of
         coordination or subordination in the sentence; this last ﬁeld can be also selected
         without specifying the ‘Macrotipo sintattico’, so it can be both used to search all the
         coordinated clauses in the poems or all the subordinates of a speciﬁc grade, but it can
         also be combined with the previous option to obtain, for example, all the 3rd grade
         relative clauses in the database.
    4.   e next option, ‘Ritmo’, requires the input of a series of digits, each separated by a
         blank space, that correspond to the ten positions of the hendecasyllable. As seen in the
         ﬁrst picture, there are three diﬀerent alternatives to be selected in the ﬁeld ‘Opzioni di
         ricerca ritmica’:
                4.1. ‘Ricerca la presenza esatta degli ictus indicati’, it is the basic option, and
                     it is automatically selected by the tool if no choice is selected by the user.
                     It narrows the research down to all the hendecasyllables with the very
                     same rhythmic sequence inputted by the user, so, when a sequence like 2
                     4 7 10 is researched, the tool returns all the tercets where there is at least
                     one hendecasyllable with the rhythm marked up exactly as 2 4 7 10.
                4.2. ‘Ricerca la presenza almeno degli ictus indicati’, it allows more ﬂexible
                    queries, where at least the ictuses speciﬁed by the user must be present,
                    but there can be others too in a single verse. is means that inputting a
                    sequence like 4 6 8 10, the tool will ﬁnd all the tercets where at least one
                    hendecasyllable has ictuses on the positions 4 6 8 10, but also any other
                    cases where other positions are accented, like 1 4 6 8 10, 2 4 6 8 10 or, if
                    present in the database, even 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.
                4.3. ‘Ricerca la presenza esatta della serie di ictus indicata’, it is the most
                    unusual option, and it allows to narrow all the results down to a speciﬁc
                    sequence of ictuses in a portion of the hendecasyllable. It means that,
                    when the digit 4 6 7 are inputted, the tool will ﬁnd all the instances
                    marked up as 4 6 7 10, but also any possible variations which would not
                    interfere with the sequence 4 6 7, such as 1 4 6 7 10, 1 2 4 6 7 19, 1 3 4 6
                    7 8 10 and similar, though it would not ﬁnd verses with a scheme like 4 7

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                                                                         the new tool TRIARS


                      10, 4 5 7 10 or 4 5 6 7 10. is option is not the most common choice,
                      but it can be of use when it is needed to focus the user’s attention onto a
                      speciﬁc portion, such as the ﬁrst, the middle or the last part, of the
                      hendecasyllable.
As obvious as it may sound from the description of the three options, TRIARS, according to
the guidelines from the Archivio Metrico Italiano, does not include a limited number of
hendecasyllable schemes, but it allows to input any rhythmic schemes, since no ictus’ sequence
is considered to be impossible or wrong, in the metrical meaning of the word.
Here’s a short example of a research involving all the available options: if the sequence ed elli is
inputted in the ﬁeld ‘Testo’, selecting the categories of dichiarativa and the function of
principale and specifying the ictuses at least on the 2, 4 and 10 positions, TRIARS is able to
ﬁnd 48 results of hendecasyllables that match all the requests. e tool then proceeds to open a
new page where the total number of results is shown, followed by the single hendecasyllable
characterized by all the speciﬁcation, organized by their appearance order in the original works
they have been taken from:




                      Figure 2: an example of how results are shown in TRIARS


At this point, the user can select the button ‘Vedi la terzina’ next to any of the results, and the
tercets in which it is located will be entirely shown, complete with the rhythm of the other two
related verses:




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                 Figure 3: the single results can be expanded to show the entire tercet.


is is the current level of development of TRIARS, which is enough to perform preliminary
researches, ones that may even be as articulated as the example above, though only related to
Dante’s Comedy. However, as it may have been evident even from a short example like the one
above, there are still many issues with the tool and a lot of work still has to be done to make it
work properly. In the next two Sections the major issues of TRIARS will be described and
discussed, with a paragraph focused on the necessary improvements that have to be taken to ﬁx
them.



       5. Major ﬂaws of the current version

In this Section the most important ﬂaws of the current version of TRIARS will be considered
from a technical point of view. Of course, observations about the technical issues of this tool
do not end the debate about the critical points of this research, points that can be of a
theoretical nature as well; nonetheless, the main focus of this paper is technical and those
theoretical aspects – such as the insurmountable problem of a univocal deﬁnition of the
syntactic type of a clause or the rhythmic proﬁle of a verse – have already been touched upon
other occasions ([8]; [9]; [10]). So, having set aside all these theoretical weaknesses, the
technical issues that TRIARS incurred in during its development phase have to be examined,
which can be rounded down to three major types of issues, all three connected to the very same
original cause.
e ﬁrst and easiest to detect ﬂaw has to do with the accuracy with which TRIARS highlights
the relevant clauses given as a result of any query. is issue is evident even when it comes to a
clause contained in a small part of a single hendecasyllable, as in the case of Inf., I 4, where the
interrogative clause qual era is not highlighted as to produce an easy distinction from the other
phrasal elements in the verse or, when the user opens it, in the tercet:




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  U. Conti – Combining rhythmic and syntactic analysis: an experiment on Dante’s Comedy with
                                                                         the new tool TRIARS




            Figure 4: an example of TRIARS’ inaccuracy in showing the clauses in the verses.


is means that the only way to distinguish this kind of clauses is for the readers to carefully
read them themselves, that is to autonomously analyse the sentence to understand its structure
and the function of the interested clause in it. is apparently easy task is bound to become
more and more diﬃcult in all the cases where a single clause occupies more than one
hendecasyllable or more than one tercet. On a closer inspection, this second kind of issue is
more critical than it appears: every single verse in which the clause is settled is counted as a
single result (at least it is without any exception when no rhythmic scheme is speciﬁed in the
research), thus making the results count unreliable. An example of this issue is the case of the
relative clause che con lena aﬀannata […] si volge all’acqua perigliosa in Inf., I 22-4:




Figure 5: an example of TRIARS’ inaccuracy in showing the clauses in the tercets.




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As this particular case shows, in the ﬁnal output of the results there is a combination of
diﬀerent issues. To be speciﬁc, the major issues here are relevant to Inf., I 24, where the tool
points out the presence of one ‘rel subord I’ and one ‘rel coord I’, meaning that next to the
(partial) relative clause si volge a l’acqua perigliosa there is the coordinated relative clause e guata,
but they are not properly highlighted and separated by TRIARS, and to Inf., I 23, where the
temporal clause uscito fuor dal pelago a la riva is wrongly showed as a relative clause. Finally, a
similar inaccuracy can be noticed in all the cases in which, contrarily to the example of Inf., I
22-4, a clause is not included in the results for a researched syntactic type:




Figure 6: an example of a wrong output in TRIARS’ results for syntactic analysis.


In Inf., I 1-3 the causal clause ché la diritta via era smarrita is considered to be both a
declarative sentence and, when a causal clause is researched, properly as a causal clause.
e problem with all these three kinds of issues is in the incompatibility between the XML
encoding used by DanteSearch and TRIARS’ search engine. Taking the last tercet as an
example, it can be read as follows in DanteSearch’s annotation:




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  U. Conti – Combining rhythmic and syntactic analysis: an experiment on Dante’s Comedy with
                                                                         the new tool TRIARS


It is evident that the end-tags of all the clauses, </cl>, are placed right before the end-tag of the
sentence, </s>; this means that for TRIARS the start-tag of the declarative clause, Nel mezzo del
cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, is only closed after the subordinate
clause ché la diritta via era smarrita. e code, to be rightly interpreted by TRIARS, should be
manually redeﬁned adjusting the XML indexes, and pointing out, case by case, the exact
boundaries between each clause.
It seems obvious that such an adjusting process for a poem like Dante’s Comedy would require
an incredible amount of working time, which, when the issue was ﬁrstly discovered with
TRIARS, was not in line with the standard duration of a Ph.D.; at that time, the only viable
possibility was a severe reduction of the database, conﬁning it to a small portion of the Comedy,
and to have it marked up in a more appropriate way for TRIARS. Anyway, this option did not
seem suitable: since the main point of the project was to prove the possibility of a rhythmic and
syntactic analysis, a large amount of data was necessary to do the preliminary research, which
would not have been equally satisfactory on a small portion of the poem. For this reason,
despite the awareness of the inaccuracy of several results and of the need of a manual analysis to
conﬁrm them, it has been opted to include these issues in the ﬁrst version of TRIARS, thus
postponing the debugging phase to a later point after the veriﬁcation of the theories behind the
entire project.



       6. Possible improvements

Knowing all these issues, the research has nonetheless been conducted with the help of TRIARS
and a later double check of all the results on the original sources of its database, DanteSearch
and Archivio Metrico Italiano; accordingly, all the results have been manually reviewed and
organized in a more readable way and discussed [9].
At this point it seems necessary to ﬁnd a way to transform TRIARS into a proper working tool,
and, later, to extend its database to include other poems in third rhyme. e ﬁrst and most
urgent improvements are related to the ﬂaws that have been presented in the previous section;
after this essential revision, several side aspects can beneﬁt of the following minor
improvements:
   1) An important feature to allow more accurate queries would be the addition of a ﬁlter
      through which the user can decide which verses of the tercet have to be taken into
      account in every research, so that it would be possible to focus the attention, when
      needed, on a speciﬁc part of the third rhyme;
   2) Another feature, which is already implemented on the Archivio Metrico Italiano, is to
      add a fourth option for the rhythmic research, giving the possibility to exclude verses
      with a speciﬁc ictus on any selected positions;
   3) A third option, is to oﬀer a text research limited to a speciﬁc sequence of alphabetical
      characters, instead of full words; for instance, this would allow to ease up the searching


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        process to ﬁnd speciﬁc grammatical categories, such as adverbs of manner in -mente or
        gerund forms of verbs;
   4) Another ﬂaw of TRIARS is that it does not discern the indirect interrogative clauses
      from the direct ones, since they are both coded as ‘int’; of course, when the function of
      any interrogative in the sentence is speciﬁed, it is impossible to mix them up, but this
      often leads to some confusion and it needs to be ﬁxed with an appropriate rewording,
      such as ‘inti’ and ‘intd’ for the two diﬀerent types;
   5) It would be necessary to oﬀer the user the possibility to visualize the previous or next
      verses (with the relative rhythmic and syntactic analysis) when a result is expanded to
      show the whole tercet, since it may be crucial when a single clause is dislocated on
      many tercets;
   6) An increase in the output legibility, with a more appropriate representation of the
      results with diﬀerent styles in the instance of two results of the same type in a single
      hendecasyllable or tercet, is another important feature to be added;
   7) Finally, the addition of Boolean operators is an expected improvement too, one that is
      already implemented on DanteSearch.
Besides these minor improvements, there is another option that has to be carefully taken into
account, one whose implementation requires a slight reconsideration of the project’s theoretical
basis. One of the most interesting prospects of TRIARS – something that emerged both from
the ﬁrst surveys on the Comedy and by scrutinising the most satisfactory results – is the
introduction of the concept of intonational syntagm in the stylistic analysis of the third rhyme.
As a matter of fact, some of the most interesting results on the Comedy’s tercets ([8]; [10]) show
important similarities also when we consider them from the perspective of intonational
syntagms, where the diﬀerent intonational proﬁles seem to be comparable from one tercet to
another. Indeed, this concept should be added beside the syntactic and rhythmic analysis, it
should be intertwined with them when needed, but more research must be made in order to
deﬁne an appropriate way of analysing and then encoding this new amount of data.



       7. A further step

e key aspect of TRIARS is the extension of the database to other poems in third rhyme, and
this can be done only after a ﬁnal and more stable version of the tool is achieved. e
importance of a comparative study of diﬀerent poems in third rhyme has already been raised in
other occasions; among the most recent and signiﬁcant ones, Corrado Calenda [7] has strongly
suggested to extend stylistic analysis to “altri minori aﬄuenti”, pointing out the need of an
“acquisizione di dati oggettivi fondati su rilevamenti tecnici”, as the one proposed by TRIARS.
Of course, due to the numerous issues that arose during the early stages of the research, no
eﬀort has still been made towards this direction, which is, however, essential to the whole
project: as a matter of fact, the tool is designed for the analysis of the third rhyme and not only

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   U. Conti – Combining rhythmic and syntactic analysis: an experiment on Dante’s Comedy with
                                                                          the new tool TRIARS


to Dante’s Comedy. is is a crucial aspect of the research, because the general theory, which
has already produced results of scientiﬁc interest regarding the Comedy, now has to be extended
and tested on other poems to be truly productive. Starting from Dante’s poem and moving
forward to other third rhyme works, the ﬁnal objective is to provide a tool to help achieving a
better understanding of the presence of Dante’s inﬂuence in diﬀerent authors and, more
generally, of the use of this meter in Italian literature throughout a comparison of its main
occurrences.
To show a brief example of the attended results, one interesting case, very infrequent also in
the Comedy, is when a consecutive clause introduced by sì che is both in the last verse of a tercet
and interrupted by an incidental clause. As already mentioned, Dante’s Comedy itself has no
more than the following four examples:
Inf., XXI 52-4
Poi l’addentar con più di cento raﬃ,                     1 4 6 8 10
disser: “Coverto convien che qui balli,                  1 4 7 9 10
sì che, se puoi, nascosamente accaﬃ”.                    1 4 8 10


Inf., XXII 70-2
E Libicocco “Troppo avem soﬀerto”,                       4 6 8 10
disse; e preseli ’l braccio col runciglio,               1 3 6 10
sì che, stracciando, ne portò un lacerto.                1 4 8 10


Inf., XXXII 88-90
“Or tu chi se’ che vai per l’Antenora,                   2 4 6 10
percotendo”, rispuose, “altrui le gote,                  3 6 8 10
sì che, se fossi vivo, troppo fora?”.                    2 4 6 8 10


Par., III 61-3
però non fui a rimembrar festino;                        2 4 8 10
ma or m’aiuta ciò che tu mi dici,                        2 4 6 10
sì che raﬃgurar m’è più latino.                          1 6 10


An observation of these results tells us that the cases are not equally distributed in the poem, to
the point that no example of this pattern can be found in the Purgatorio. Another interesting

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point to be highlighted, which has to be directly connected to the syntactic use of the
consecutive clauses, is that all four tercets end with a strong syntactic pause, one that coincides
with the metrical limit of the third rhyme; moreover, with the exception of Inf., XXII 88-90, all
the tercets are part of a direct speech of one of the characters, which is introduced by a verbum
dicendi, with one of the typical formulas often used by Dante in the poem in such cases and
well analysed in [11]. Finally, from a rhythmic point of view, it is interesting to see that all the
incidental clauses start from the third position of the verse, just after the sì che and that they
adopt several diﬀerent rhythmic solutions, since just two out of four show the same 1 4 8 10
scheme, even though their intonational proﬁles are not dissimilar.
A closer look to other third rhyme works from the Italian fourteenth century literature reveals
that such identical structures can be even found in shorter poems, like the Caccia di Diana by
Giovanni Boccaccio and the Trionﬁ by Francesco Petrarca, which show one example each, in
the following cases:


Caccia di Diana, XV, 28-30
per che lasciar l’astore allor le piacque,               4 6 8 10
il qual, montato, uno ne ferio,                          2 4 6 10
sì che ’n sull’erba morendo si giacque,                  1 4 7 10


Triumphus Eternitatis, vv. 28-30
E le tre parti sue vidi ristrecte                        4 6 7 10
ad una sola, e quella una esser ferma                    4 7 8 10
sì che, come solea, più non s’aﬀrette;                   1 6 7 10


e interesting aspect to highlight, and that should represent the main focus of the whole
research as it has been intended, is related to the diﬀerences between Dante’s style and other
authors’, evident even in the context of the analysis of such a short sample. Indeed, in these two
cases it is clear how Boccaccio postpones the incidental clause to a later part of the
hendecasyllable, even though he is still using the gerund, as Dante does in Inf., XXII 70-2, and
it is also evident how there is a rhythmic distance from the Comedy, since in both cases we have
an ictus on the seventh position of the last hendecasyllables that is never accented in Dante’s
verses.
 Of course, this is not enough data to make any deﬁnite assumption on these poets’ styles and
more research is to be expected to have a clearer idea of Dante’s debt in the early Italian third
rhyme. Even if we are not suggesting that both Boccaccio and Petrarca had had in mind these
very tercets written by Dante when they composed their own verses, though, the main point is
to see how similar structures can occur in diﬀerent authors and how they can be compared in
both their diﬀerences and similarities. e fact that even such a short sample can inspire

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  U. Conti – Combining rhythmic and syntactic analysis: an experiment on Dante’s Comedy with
                                                                         the new tool TRIARS


stylistic considerations shows how the extension of the database to other poems in third rhyme
can be essential for a better understanding on one of the most successful meters of Italian
literature.



       8. Conclusions

Besides these ﬁrst considerations on the third rhyme, the general idea one gets from these early
observations on the Comedy is that such a study is possible and useful as to have a clearer vision
of Dante’s style. e most evident aspect is the coincidence in the utilisation of the same type
of clauses in diﬀerent contexts: as it may seem obvious, in the narrow space of three verses and
in the metrical strictness of the hendecasyllable, there must be some recurrence in the
sentences’ structure, recurrences that are often stimulated by the poet’s memory.
To provide a quick example of these coincidences, that, as it is important to note, are also
related to the sentences’ intonational proﬁle, it is possible to notice an identical structure of the
declarative sentences in the following tercets:
Inf., XXVIII 133-5
E perché tu di me novella porti,                          3 4 6 8 10
sappi ch’i’ son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli                1 4 6 8 10
che diedi al re giovane i ma’ conforti.                   2 4 5 10


Inf., XXXII 67-9
E perché non mi metti in più sermoni,                     3 6 10
sappi ch’i’ fu’ il Camiscion de’ Pazzi;                   1 4 8 10
e aspetto Carlin che mi scagioni”.                        3 6 10


Moreover, interesting similarities can also be highlighted in the structure of the following
occurrences of temporal clauses:


Inf., XXV 70-2
Già eran li due capi un divenuti,                         2 6 7 10
quando n’apparver due ﬁgure miste                         1 4 8 10
in una faccia, ov’eran due perduti.                       4 6 8 10



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Purg., XIX 25-7
Ancor non era sua bocca richiusa,                     2 4 7 10
quand’una donna apparve santa e presta                4 6 8 10
lunghesso me per far colei confusa.                   2 4 8 10


More relevant coincidences though can also be found in the following relative clauses in rhyme,
which even share the same rhyme word resplende/risplende in the last verse:


Par., XV 19-21
tale dal corno che ’n destro si stende                1 4 7 10
a piè di quella croce corse un astro                  2 4 6 8 10
de la costellazion che lì resplende;                  1 4 6 8 10


Par., XX 4-6
lo ciel, che sol di lui prima s’accende,              2 4 6 7 10
subitamente si rifà parvente                          4 8 10
per molte luci, in che una risplende;                 2 4 7 10


is is just a quick summary of what results are to be expected with TRIARS, but it already
shows how cases like these corroborate the idea that any syntactic type has its own preference
when it comes to the usage of the structure of the “piccolo ritmo” of the hendecasyllable and,
more importantly, of the “grande ritmo” of the third rhyme. ese results seem to highlight
what appear to be some composing habits that, even a poet like Dante, often resorts to: rhythm
and syntax are both heavily inﬂuenced by these habits, and they are often structured in
comparable ways that can tell us a lot about an author’s style.



        References

     [1] Alighieri, Dante, “Commedia.” In Petrocchi, Giorgio (Ed.), La Commedia secondo
         l’antica vulgata, Firenze: Le Lettere, 1994.
     [2] Beccaria, Gian Luigi. 1975 (1970). “L’autonomia del signiﬁcante. Figure dantesche.”
         In L’autonomia del signiﬁcante. Figure del ritmo e della sintassi. Dante, Pascoli,
         D’annunzio (pp. 114-135), Torino: Einaudi.


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                                                                       the new tool TRIARS


 [3] Beltrami, Pietro. 2015 (1975). “Primi appunti sull’arte del verso nella Divina
     Commedia.” In L’esperienza del verso. Scritti di metrica italiana (pp. 5-32), Bologna: Il
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 [4] Beltrami, Pietro. 2015 (1976). “Sul metro della Divina Commedia: sondaggi per
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 [5] Bertinetto, Pier Marco. 1973. “Ritmo e modelli ritmici. Analisi computazionale delle
     funzioni periodiche nella versiﬁcazione dantesca.” Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.
 [6] Boccaccio, Giovanni. “La Caccia di Diana.” In Iocca, Irene (Ed.), La Caccia di Diana,
     Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2016.
 [7] Calenda, Corrado. 2014. “La terza rima tra Dante e Boccaccio.” In Azzetta, Luca, and
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 [8] Conti, Ugo. 2020. “Prime osservazioni per un’analisi ritmico-sintattica della
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 [9] Conti, Ugo. 2021. “Per uno studio ritmico-sintattico della terza rima: prime
     osservazioni sulla Commedia dantesca.” PhD diss., Università di Firenze.
 [10] Conti, Ugo. 2022. “Per un’analisi ritmico-sintattica della terza rima: il caso delle
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 [11] Contini, Gianfranco. 1970 (1965). “Un’interpretazione di Dante.” In Un’idea di
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 [12] Contini, Gianfranco. 2021 (1970). “An idea of Dante.” Translated by Stephen
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 [13] Gigli, Sara. 2004. “Codiﬁca sintattica della Commedia dantesca.” PhD diss.,
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 [14] Petrarca, Francesco. “Trionﬁ.” In Pacca, Vinicio, and Laura Paolino (Eds.), Trionﬁ,
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 [15] Praloran, Marco, and Marco Tizi. 1988. “Narrare in ottave. Metrica e stile
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 [16] Praloran, Marco (Ed.). 2004. “La metrica dei Fragmenta.” Roma-Padova: Antenore.




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    [17] Praloran, Marco, and Arnaldo Soldani. 2003. “Teoria e modelli di scansione.” In
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    [18] Robey, David. (2000). “Sound and structure in the Divine Comedy.” Oxford:
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