The database of the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO) was formed in order to create a dictionary. However, since that time it has proved to be an autonomous and irreplaceable instrument for linguistic, literary and philological studies on Old Italian.
Its rigour and its organization, precise and easy to use, renders it a point of reference for an increasing number of researchers that use it.
(see the link Citazioni on the OVI homepage [http://www.ovi.cnr.it]).
The TLIO database brings together almost all the texts written in a variety of Old Italian by the end of the XIV century. This means that texts of all kinds, dimension and origin coexist and come together (at the discretion of the users, who can always set up their own filters of selection) inside the corpus. The corpus makes it possible to read and consult together, or separately, famous literary texts such as the Divine Comedy and the Decameron, lesser known nonliterary writings (contracts, bills, wills or memoirs, etc.), short very ancient texts like the inscription from the Roman catacomb of Commodilla (just six words), as well as translations of classic literary texts such as the 14th century translations of Ovid or of medieval legal texts such as the Constitution of the Comune of Siena. Furthermore, alongside with the numerous Tuscan and Venetian texts, the corpus also contains texts in many lesser known linguistical varietes.
The database is in continual quantitative and qualitative evolution.
Roughly every six months it is updated and enriched with the most recent bibliographical data derived from the most recent studies. New data characteristics, more trustworthy editions and texts are to be found in the bibliographic archive of the database (vd. Bibliografia dei Testi Volgari accessible from our website), and on the database.
In the most recent version the TLIO database contains 1960 texts, equivalent to 21,779,245 occurrencies (3,576,383 of which lemmatised; lemmas are 116,597), and can be searched with several software programs: one for internal use (cfr. the Focus on GATTO) and two for online search: PhiloLogic (ItalNet consortium, only by written forms),and GattoWEB (also by lemmas); both are freely available on the Internet. It is now available an additional non-lemmatised corpus (implemented in GattoWEB) which contains 122 texts equivalent to 269,880 occurrencies.
Focus