Qualche suggestione dalla lettura di Terracini interprete di Ascoli

Benvenuto Terracini describes Graziadio Isaia Ascoli’s conception of linguistics, with a view to identifying evidence of Ascoli’s sensitivity to the historical development of languages. Terracini is especially interested in Ascoli’s attention to the temporary co-existence of variant forms for the same phenomenon. The process by which one of the varieties ends up displacing the others, thus becoming the only form for a given phenomenon is also a chief interest of Terracini himself, but he succeeds nevertheless in underlining the distance between Ascoli’s (and Carlo Salvioni’s) positivist conception of linguistics and his own vision of the discipline.