Il caos e l'ordine: le lingue romanze nella storia della cultura europea by Lorenzo Tomasin

REVIEWS Il caos e l’ordine: le lingue romanze nella storia della cultura europea. By L T. Turin: Einaudi. . xii+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. Does Romance linguistics still deserve a place in the humanities? According to Lorenzo Tomasin the answer is yes: Romance studies is still a productive ﬁeld and oﬀers more than one might expect. To demonstrate this point, Tomasin unfolds an argument in seven chapters, each exploring a speciﬁc conceptual bipolarity between chaos and order—that is, between a tendency towards dispersion, i.e. diversi ﬁcation and departure from regularity, and a tendency towards concentration, i.e. protection of unity and stability. One of Tomasin’s strategies for recognizing patterns in the apparent chaos of Romance languages consists in analysing their relationship to Latin (Chapter , ‘Lingue morte e lingue vive’). is is the approach of the German linguists of the early nineteenth century, in response to which the structuralists of the following century established a distinction between synchronic and diachronic analysis. However, according to Tomasin, it would be misguided to consider linguistics as no longer a historical science. In this sense, to call Latin a dead language is misleading: neo-Latin languages are nothing but Latin itself in its natural and uninterrupted survival through time and space. Tomasin’s second chapter (‘Analogia e anomalia’) traces the way in which the occurrence of order has at times been related to the spontaneous development of relationships based on similarities, and at other times to unexpected fractures in a regulatory pattern. While the ancient grammarians considered anomalies to be responsible for linguistic change and tried to limit them through analogical procedures, the German Neogrammarians illustrated how even analogy stimulates a change whenever it violates an established law. us, analogy became a premiss which allowed twentieth-century speakers to break established rules. e lifeblood of a language could lie precisely in this dialectic between a search for new forms of order and a continuous breaking of existing paradigms. Another point of focus for Tomasin is the alternation between moments of expansion and moments of contraction (Chapter , ‘Diastole e sistole’). For Heinrich Lausberg this alternation between upheaval/readaptation and regulation/ conservatism is the key to understanding linguistic transformation. e metaphor expresses several polarities, including the opposition between fragmentation in local varieties and linguistic uniﬁcation. Tomasin analyses the implications of such a scheme, including the possibility of a ‘return to Babel’: an explosion of linguistic diversity made possible by technological advancements. Tomasin’s fourth chapter (‘Lessico e grammatica’) identiﬁes two perspectives which pushed linguists to prefer some forms of order over others: lexical comparison and the analysis of morphological elements. e classiﬁcation of diﬀerent parts of speech has been a cornerstone of grammatical analysis for centuries. Yet in recent times attention has shied towards, on the one hand, syntax analysis, which  Reviews is able more eﬀectively to support the modern aspiration to describe the general facts of language rather than to govern them, and, on the other hand, logical analysis, which is able to satisfy the aspiration to identify the manifestation of an idea within a sentence. Tomasin warns the reader that the diﬀerent attitudes do not necessarily stem from an improvement of the discipline, but from a recalibration of its aims. is distinguishes the epistemological statute of linguistics from that of disciplines, such as medicine, which, in focusing always on the same objectives, have made their frameworks and tools increasingly rigorous. e aﬃrmation of a descriptive ambition facilitates the reformulation of the dualism between exception and rule in terms of two diﬀerently conceived regularities. e ﬁh chapter (‘Eccezione e regola’) explores this idea. With the Neogrammarians , for example, ancient rules become laws, while exceptions were rationalized in a closed set of possible deviations and examined through their evolution. In the twentieth century, however, new deﬁnitions of what constitutes a rule were oﬀered by structuralism and generative grammar, indicating not only an increased debt to programming languages but also a loss of interest in historical investigation, an attitude which Tomasin interprets as a decrease in the ability to explain exceptions. Chapter  (‘Antico e moderno’) demonstrates how the diversity of historical backgrounds requires di...