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PRIN 2022 “Clearer Acts. VocAvv: The Lawyer’s words”

 

  1. Project Title:

Acts Increasingly Clear: VocAvv – The Lawyer’s Words

  1. Project Leader:

Prof. Jacqueline Visconti (University of Genoa)

  1. Researchers Involved:

Principal Investigator: Prof. Jacqueline Visconti (University of Genoa). Scientific coordinators of local units: Prof. Riccardo Gualdo (University of Tuscia); Prof. Federigo Bambi (University of Florence); Prof. Maria Vittoria Dell’Anna (University of Salento)

  1. Start Date:

7/10/2023

  1. End Date:

6/10/2025

  1. Brief Description and Objectives of the Research:

The clarity of legal documents is essential for the efficiency and quality of a modern justice system. This issue has recently been addressed by the PRIN project Acts Clear (Prot. 2017BSECYX), which will conclude on December 29, 2023 (second extension under D.D. prot. 1881 of November 21, 2022), and involved the same Units as the 2022 project. PRIN Acts Clear has built, almost entirely and for the first time in Italy, a corpus of lawyer’s acts of about two million words, composed of civil and criminal legal documents, diverse in type and geographical origin, and referring to various stages of the legal process, enabling the study of the forensic variety of Italian, previously inaccessible to research. Using this unique resource, the PRIN 2022 project Acts Increasingly Clear/VocAvv aims to create an online vocabulary of forensic Italian, including legal terms used by lawyers and entirely based on the corpus. This vocabulary will fill a gap in Italian lexicography, where, despite important resources on normative lexicon and legal doctrine, there is a complete lack of a reliable tool based on linguistic methods for studying legal lexicon, which nevertheless constitutes a considerable portion of legal vocabulary. The new vocabulary will be called VocAvv, and due to its specific characteristics, it will be unprecedented among tools dedicated to our language. VocAvv will provide lemma and their respective examples for each consultation, allowing the search for lexemes within their context. Lexical combinations (or collocations), which are of great interest to lexicographers today, will be selected with the help of statistical co-occurrences and chronologically documented. In addition to scholars and professionals, VocAvv will be a valuable resource for citizens, including foreigners, as an aid in understanding documents intended for them, which are often incomprehensible even to educated readers.

  1. Collaborating Institutions:

Accademia della Crusca

  1. Funding Type and Call:

PRIN 2022 Call, Directorate Decree no. 104 of 02/02/2022. Prot. No. 20229FS8MZ, sector SH4 Social Sciences and Humanities; sub-sector: SH4_11 Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, Discourse Analysis

  1. Website:

https://attichiari.unige.it