Claudia Casto

The project investigates the language and vocabulary of nineteenth-century Italian explorations through the analysis of a selected corpus of travel texts written by explorers active between the mid and late nineteenth century. The aim is to provide a systematic description of the graphic, morphosyntactic, stylistic, and lexical features of this type of text, which remains largely unexplored in linguistic studies, during a crucial period for the consolidation of post-unification Italian.
Special attention is given to technical and scientific vocabulary (zoological, botanical, geographical, ethnographic) and to instances of linguistic interference, such as loanwords and neologisms, which reflect the international and colonial dimensions of these explorations. The research integrates tools from historical linguistics, diachronic lexicography, and corpus linguistics, with the additional goal of producing a historical-descriptive glossary of specialist terms used in travel narratives.
The project sits at the intersection of language history, studies on specialist languages, and digital humanities, contributing to the appreciation and development of a body of texts of significant cultural and linguistic value.