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

Abstract

This 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. The paper is then structured as follows: after a short overview of the research project that led to its creation, 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 potential 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.