Titles associated with power in a corpus of fictional prose in Italian (XIX-XXI century)

This study investigates whether and how titles related to military ranks, religious roles, and nobiliary titles, representing power and privileges, have changed and distributed throughout the last two centuries in literary works in Italian. Furthermore, the study focuses on possible differences between prose originally written in Italian and translations. The initial hypotheses are that, with social changes, the idea of power evolved as well, thus ‘traditional’ power titles diminished over time, and that historical events caused differences in the representation of power in Italian and foreign literature. The study is based on a corpus of fictional prose written by Italian authors and translated into Italian from other languages between 1800 and 2005 (~8,000,000 words). The extraction is conducted using automatic methods: a list of words related to figures of power is created using WikiData, then items are found and counted in the corpus using ad hoc scripts. Although limits imposed by genres and topics in such a specific lexical extraction, which makes data too scarce to be statistically significant, observing trends partially confirms the initial hypotheses, as a generally descending tendency and small differences between the two sections of the corpus can be detected.