SOURCE: Stancati, Claudia. “The French Sources of Leopardi's Linguistics.” In Historical Roots of Linguistic Theories, edited by Lia Formigari and Daniele Gambarara, pp. 129-39. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995.

In the following essay, Stancati examines the relationship of Leopardi's linguistic theory to his study of various thinkers of the French Enlightenment.

Giacomo Leopardi's “rationally founded and demonstrated scepticism” (ZIB [Zibaldone]: 1653) draws its nourishment from still-vital elements of Enlightenment thought. This can be seen, for example, if we explore Leopardi's connection with Holbach (cf. Stancati 1979). But it is true in a more general way of his relationship with other French Enlightenment thinkers, also with regard to the question of a national language, the “questione della lingua”, which is an important aspect of Leopardi's political and cultural project. As Lo Piparo (1982) and Gensini (1984) have shown, Leopardi's materialist anthropology, based on the discovery of the “adaptive” nature of man, is tightly linked to...