Tra Valla e Scaligero: Leibniz, la linguistica rinascimentale e il problema del cambiamento semantico

This paper focuses Leibniz's philosophy of natural language and, more particularly, his assumption that the shifts of meaning in the use of common speech's words are ruled by the tropes studied by Rhetorics (mainly metaphor and metonymy). Leibniz affirms to have taken this suggestion from the books on Latin language by Julius Caesar Scaliger, a rather problematical attribution. Anyway, his attempt of showing how the more "abstract" meanings of our languages arise from the tropic use of words which had a different original meaning is a task he shares with many other scholars of his age and which will be prosecuted by Vico and Rousseau. This paper shows that Leibniz gives a cautious application of his assumption, neverthless coming to very interesting semantic problems (such as the underlying rules in the use of prepositions in European languages) and, more generally, to an approach to etymology very similar to that which is proposed by contemporary scholars.