Exploring Nominal Agreement in Early Medieval Charters through the LLDB Database: Methods and a Pilot Sample from Tuscany (785–795)

This paper explores the LLDB database as a resource for investigating nominal agreement in eighth-century Latin charters, based on a pilot sample of 48 documents drafted in the Lucca area (Tuscany) between 785 and 795. Methodologically, mismatches are identified through the LLDB coding system and then checked qualitatively, especially where agreement interacts with other types of deviation. The analysis shows that nominal agreement mismatches are unevenly distributed across the texts and tend to cluster in high-frequency formulaic sequences. A second recurrent factor is their interaction with very common phonographic phenomena and with lexemes showing case-form rigidification in medieval sources. The paper concludes that nominal agreement variation may contribute to assessing scribal linguistic competence within a predominantly memory-based drafting process, provided that frequency and formulaic routinisation are explicitly taken into account.