We present here the initial stages of the construction of the DIADIta corpus, a diachronic corpus of Italian annotated for interactional pragmatic phenomena. First, we describe the annotation scheme, which is structured into four levels: speech acts (e.g., apology; threat), forms (e.g., discourse marker; expressive), pragmatic functions (which are speaker-oriented, e.g., mitigation; turn-taking), and pragmatic aims (which are interlocutor-oriented, e.g., attention-getting; request for agreement). Next, we discuss how the results of a first annotation exercise provide indications for refining the annotation procedure.

Synaesthesia is a type of metaphor associating linguistic expressions that refer to two different sensory modalities. Previous studies, based on the analysis of poetic texts, have shown that synaesthetic transfers tend to go from the lower toward the higher senses (e.g., sweet music vs. musical sweetness). In non-literary language synaesthesia is rare, and finding a sufficient number of examples manually would be too time-consuming. In order to verify whether the directionality also holds for conventional synaesthesia found in non-literary texts, an automatic procedure for the identification of instances of synaesthesia is therefore highly desirable. In this paper, we first focus on the preliminary step of this procedure, that is, the creation of a controlled lexicon of perception. Next, we present the results of a small pilot study that applies the extraction procedure to English and Italian corpus data.