Immaginare il mutamento: le metafore della linguistica, tra passato, presente e futuro

Reflection on language by both linguists and ordinary speakers is infused with metaphorical thinking. As is well known, scientific metaphor also played a funda-mental role in the birth of modern linguistics and, still today, continues to shape the imagination of scholars and their metalanguage. This paper focuses on the function of metaphors in the processes of language making, through which linguists conceptualise their object of study, visualise its synchronic functioning and depict diachronic phenomena. Two pairs of concepts reflecting different ideas and theo-ries about language are analysed in particular: discreteness vs. continuity and na-ture vs. culture. Examples demonstrate how these key themes are intertwined in concrete representations of language change, generating images that hover be-tween time and space, heaven and earth, and logarithms and algorithms. The con-clusions compare the imagery of past linguistics with the reality of present-day re-search, which appears functional – and perhaps overly subservient – to a future dominated by artificial intelligence.