Sull'uso dei termini metalinguistici depluralizzazione e allineamento (suffissale) nell'opera di Roberto Gusmani

This paper analyses the usage of the metalinguistic terms depluralizzazione (“depluralization”) and allineamento (suffissale) “(suffixal) alignment” in the work of Roberto Gusmani, focusing both on the history of these terms and on their effectiveness as metalinguistic terms. While depluralizzazione appears to be a new creation by Gusmani, the term allineamento has a long story, which goes back to Meyer-Lübke’s Historische Grammatik der französischen Sprache. It turns out that both terms refer to complex phenomena, which for various reasons cannot be easily described by the means of a single metalinguistic term. Starting from the analysis of these concrete cases, attention is drawn on the fact that shaping a metalanguage for linguistics (particularly for contact linguistics) is not just a trivial matter of providing a proper name to things and facts; rather, it requires a deep knowledge of the topics involved and the ability to clearly distinguish phenomena, which differ from one another only in small details. It is shown that Gusmani opts for highly descriptive metalinguistic labels, which are functional to his reasoning and actually bolster it; this in turn confirms the importance of Gusmani’s contribution to the creation of the metalanguage of linguistics.