An Open Diachronic Dataset of Requests in Italian: Annotation, Challenges and a Case Study

Strategies for making requests often change over time. Focusing on Italian, we present a diachronic dataset of requests extracted from dialogic interactions in literary texts (e.g. theatre plays) from the 13th to the 20th century. Requests are drawn from the pragmatically annotated diachronic corpus DIADIta and from more recent, contemporary sources, and are further annotated using a fine-grained scheme for pragmalinguistic analyses. We describe the annotation scheme and data curation process, discuss challenges of the pragmatic analysis of historical data, report quantitative results addressing our research question, and outline potential reuse scenarios.