Una pagina di storia della linguistica rivisitata: la Geografia linguistica romanza e la linguistica areale

The paper gives a brief overview of the most important results achieved by Linguistic geography and Areal linguistics in the field of Romance Linguistics. The origin of Linguistic geography goes back to Gilliéron and his school. These scholars developed a ‘stratigraphic’ mode of interpretation of linguistic maps, aiming to modify the linguistic model of the Neogrammarians, based on sound laws. In the early 1960s, in the light of Saussurean and post- Saussurean linguistics, the methods, techniques and achievements of Linguistic geography seemed to many scholars to be outdated. This was the ‘crisis’ of Linguistic geography. This is not to say that linguistic geography never had and never will have any use. From the beginning linguistic maps brought to light interesting phenomena that have become accepted wisdom in linguistics and dialectology. One of these concerns the fact that, at least in some cases, dialects are typically identified by a bundle of isoglosses. Moreover, Matteo Bartoli ‘areal norms’ represent the most important attempt to explain the distribution of linguistic forms in geographical space.