Alliteration and Assonance

What can we say about the sounds of Dante's Divine Comedy on the basis of an entirely, or almost entirely, automatic translation of the electronic text into a phonological representation: that is, with the maximum of technology and the minimum of manual intervention? This entails one major limitation in the resultant analysis, that it cannot take accentual rhythm into account. We also need to recognize a number of other, less important limitations, resulting from other elements of the phonological system that are not reflected in Italian spelling. In part, these limitations depend on whether the phonological system is that of Tuscan or of other forms of the standard language. This chapter examines the distribution of vocalic and consonantal phonemes in the text of the Divine Comedy, and the distribution of vocalic and consonantal repetitions — assonances and alliterations. In all cases comparisons are made with a large range of related, and some unrelated, texts. Such repetitions have figured largely in modern Dante criticism and modern criticism in general.