Le correctiones nello Zibaldone di Giacomo Leopardi

This paper aims to examine how people, in both spoken and written language, come back to what they have just said or written. This is the phenomenon of correctio or editing, so that we correct what we say or write, substitute one form for another, reformulate, paraphrase, etc., appealing to our metalinguistic capacities of reflection/control. In this study, we have examined in detail how such activities of correctio or editing take place in an exemplary Italian literature and culture text, namely Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone. In this text, the author ̶ writing “a penna corrente” and applying the principle of liaison des idées ̶ goes back to what he has already written in order to better explain it, revise its content, modify it, improve it, and so on. In this context, we have selected the most frequently used connectives that, in Italian, introduce these “revisions”, i.e. glosses of various kinds that Leopardi uses to explain, rephrase, illustrate, etc. what he has said before.