Il giornalismo spettatoriale e la trasmissione delle idee sulla lingua

At the beginning of the 18th century, a new form of opinion journalism was founded in England, known today under the label of spectator journalism. The genre soon became an international phenomenon and played a decisive role in the circulation of ideas on language. Spectator periodicals are therefore a valuable resource for reconstructing the terms of the Eu- ropean language debate of the century. While digital tools now allow in-depth research on a vast amount of material, a contrastive analysis of the metalinguistic reflections in the Spectators nevertheless remains a research desideratum. The contribution presents the method employed in the PhD project with which we intend to approach such research.