Abstract

This paper presents a new diachronic corpus of the Italian language, i.e., CODIT (COrpus Diacronico dell’ITaliano ‘Diachronic corpus of Italian’). After a description of the corpus design, the second part of the article is devoted to show possible applications of the corpus in the morphological field, specifically in the domain of evaluative morphology. We highlight the corpus’ strengths and limitations through the diachronic analysis of two affixes, i.e., sopra- and -oide. The study contributes to shed light on the dynamism of evaluative morphology by focusing on the loss of the intensification function suffered by sopra- and the emergence of an approximating value that currently affects -oide.