La linguistique historique récente en Italie

Historical linguistics is one of the areas in which Italian linguistics is particularly productive. It is characterised by some specific features: a constant attention to the theoretical grounds and methodological aspects of the discipline, a rigorous scrutiny of the philological data, a growing interaction with the syntactic typology. Whereas the adjective “historical” must be interpreted in a broad sense, i.e. by taking into account social and cultural phenomena as many as possible, there is some practitioners of historical linguistics who adopt an exclusively formal approach, that should be more correctly labelled “diachronic linguistics”.