CORPUS STYLISTIC EXPLORATION OF LEXICAL PATTERNS, SEMANTIC FIELDS, AND CONTEXTUAL MEANING IN DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY

Abstract

This study observes the lexical, semantic, and contextual patterns in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy through a digital humanities approach using Voyant Tools. The purpose of the study is to discover how computational text analysis procedures can improve traditional literary interpretation by revealing systematic linguistic and thematic structures across the three canticles Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. To attain this, the research employs a qualitative textual analysis method reinforced by digital tools, concentrating on four stages: corpus preparation, descriptive analysis, lexical and frequency analysis, and contextual–semantic exploration. The poem was transformed into a clean textual corpus and uploaded into Voyant Tools, where visualizations and quantitative actions such as term frequency, word clouds, trend graphs, collocate networks, phrases, and keyword-in-context (KWIC) were generated. The conclusions show that Dante’s language displays a clear lexical evolution aligned with the divine journey described in the narrative. Negative and concrete terms related to suffering, darkness, and sin control Inferno, whereas transitional vocabulary illustrating purification, prayer, and moral growth appears in Purgatorio. In contrast, Paradiso structures highly abstract and theological language centered on light, divine love, harmony, and spiritual imagery. Semantic networks show strong collections around key concepts such as “love,” “light,” “grace,” and “justice,” while contextual analysis demonstrates how these terms shift in meaning across the poem. The study concludes that Voyant Tools effectively highlights patterns that support close-reading traditions and contributes measurable and reproducible insights into Dante’s symbolic vocabulary and thematic style. The combination of digital humanities improves the interpretative depth of classical literary works and determines the value of computational methods for analyzing complex poetic texts.