Claudia Chaste

The project investigates the language and lexicon 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, in a crucial period for the consolidation of post-unification Italian.
Particular attention is given to technical and scientific vocabulary (zoological, botanical, geographical, ethnographic) and to phenomena of linguistic interference, such as loanwords and neologisms, which reflect the international and colonial dimension of the explorations. The research incorporates tools from historical linguistics, diachronic lexicography, and corpus linguistics, with the aim of also producing a historical-descriptive glossary of the specialist terms found in travel narratives.
The project stands at the intersection of language history, studies on specialized languages, and digital humanities, contributing to the appreciation of a textual heritage of significant cultural and linguistic value.