Lex-Rhet-It: a Corpus of Normative Texts in Italian

A full description of the corpus is available in: Evangelista, Daria (2025), La legge ornata. Un'analisi dei testi normativi tra retorica e linguistica del testo, Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria. Feel free to contact the author should you need it. The construction of the corpus, as well as its analysis and annotation, was carried out manually. The corpus is entirely in Italian and contains laws promulgated mainly in Italy and Switzerland, as well as normative texts of the European Union and international treaties. The corpus design followed three criteria: i) that the corpus should be representative of the text genre “normative text”; ii) that it should provide examples that are as differentiated as possible of rhetorical phenomena; iii) and that the textual subgenres (ordinary laws, constitutions, codes, treaties, etc.) should be balanced in terms of quantity and length so as to serve as a reference pool for a quantitative analysis as well. Structure: - the first part (1-6) contains approximately seventy excerpts (for a total of about 200,000 tokens) from texts located at the top of the hierarchy of normative texts. These include major international and European treaties (in their Italian translations), statutes of international organizations and European bodies, national and cantonal constitutions, and civil, penal, and administrative procedure codes, most of which were adopted during the twentieth century; - the second part (7-10) consists of approximately ninety excerpts (with a total size mirroring the first part, i.e. about 200,000 tokens) from international and European treaties, as well as recent national laws, decrees, and ordinances (adopted mainly from the year 2000 onwards) addressing contemporary issues, among which the most prominent are the environment, immigration, and culture.