Abstract
This paper aims to apply a corpus-driven approach to Dante Alighieri's Latin works using UDante, a treebank based on Dante Search and part of the Universal Dependencies project. We present a method based on the notion of barycentre applied to a dependency tree as a way to calculate the “syntactic balance” of a sentence.
Its application to Dante's Latin works shows its potential in analysing the style of an author, and contributes to the interpretation of the supprema constructio mentioned in DVE II vi 7 as a well balanced syntactic pattern modeled on Latin literary writing.