Il tempo e lo spazio nel "Vocabolario dei dialetti Salentini" di Gerhard Rohlfs

The scholarly activity of Gerhard Rohlfs represents an indispensable legacy for all scholars of Romance languages. His most important works are dictionaries and linguistic studies on the regions of Calabria, Apulia and Lucania, together with his "Historische Grammatik der italienischen Sprache und ihrer Mundarten" (1949-1954), translated and published in Italian during the following decade with the title "Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti" (1966-1969). The importance of these contributions lies in a) the fact that they have provided excellent dictionaries and linguistic studies on the regions of Southern Italy, attracting renewed attention of scholars towards the linguistic history of Southern Italy; b) the author’s extraordinary ability to establish an extremely fruitful and direct contact with those strata of Italian society that have usually remained alien to any dialogue with university culture (Varvaro 1991, p. 141); c) a way of research which combines the historical-comparative method of neogrammatic descent with geolinguistic research (Tomasin 2017, p. 163). In this regard, the present contribution will draw a compendium of the experiences and factors that have helped shape the composite research profile of Gerhard Rohlfs, who, between tradition and innovation, has managed to earn the esteem and gratitude of generations of scholars, attract criticism, and to fuel important - but necessary - debates. Starting from these premises, we will trace the contribution of field research and linguistic geography in the genesis and structure of the Vocabolario dei Dialetti Salentini, a monumental lexicographical work that, sixty years after its publication, remains anunsurpassed point of reference in the history of Apulian lexicography.