Iorgu Iordan e l’‘affettività’ nella linguistica romanza fra Otto- e Novecento

Abstract

The paper deals with the psychological category of ‘affectivity’ in the Romance linguistics between the 19^th and the 20^th century, using as a reference point Iorgu Iordan’s Introduction to Romance Linguistics. Thanks to a great number of translations, the book had a remarkable fortune and can offer an in- teresting survey of the Romance linguistics of the 20 th century. Particularly, the contribution focuses on Iordan’s paragraph concerning the linguistic studies on affectivity. First, comparing the translations of Iordan’s book, it investigates the different translations of ‘affectivity’, which, between the 19^th and the 20^th century, was a sort of technical term of the German-speaking Sprachpsychologie. Then, it studies the structure of Iordan’s paragraph, showing how it mir- rors the complexity of the concept of affectivity in the linguistics of the period, which was used and/or criticised by different linguistic schools (such as the linguistic Neoidealism and the Geneva School).