The publication of a ‘digital Pirandello’ is a service that requires comprehensive knowledge of the specific language used by the Agrigento-born writer. This knowledge cannot be entrusted to partial lexical indexes, but needs to be based on a tool capable of offering a comprehensive and structured overview of the lexical heritage of the Opera Omnia
This need is met by a tool with a long tradition, namely the concordance, i.e., a complete vocabulary of the work, classified grammatically and linked in its entries to the dictionary headwords. In the age of textual linguistics and electronic computers, concordances are presented “as works of complete lexical analysis accompanied by statistical indexes” (Savoca). This means that, thanks to increasingly sophisticated software, the possibilities of asking specific questions about a text (how many times does a word occur? What weight does it have in the overall language of the work itself? What are the ‘key words’?) are increasingly within the reach of scholars, ‘naive’ readers, and students.
Our goal is to produce a specific concordance for each of Pirandello's works, while at the same time making each one part of an overall series, which, upon completion of the National Edition, will lead to the compilation of a Vocabulary of all the works, an indispensable tool not only for providing innovative and original keys to understanding the texts, but also useful for reconstructing a very important moment in the formation of the language of the Italian novel of the twentieth century.
Within this section, users have access to a search engine that allows them to query the corpus of works (which is constantly growing) by lemma, viewing the relevant contexts. They can also access the vocabulary of each individual text, for which a complete concordance is provided, created according to the methods and principles set out in the Guide in this section.
Other tools accompanying the individual concordances are the frequency index of forms and headwords and the list of specific forms, which contains the specific forms of each edition for each work.
