Manzoni left a large number of writings on language in manuscript form, which he either had no opportunity or intention to publish. The most important among them is without a doubt the treatise Della lingua italiana, which he worked on for over thirty years (his eterno lavoro), starting in 1830. In this text he goes well beyond the problems of language as related to his novel or to the longstanding “language question”, and deals with several fundamental theoretical problems in general linguistics, such as the origin and nature of human language (variously explained in the history of philosophy), the conventional and arbitrary character of the linguistic sign, and the primary role of usage in regulating a society’s verbal communication. In his treatise (of which there are as many as five different redactions), he compares his own innovative ideas with the theoretical perspectives of the past (the seventeenth century Port-Royal philosophers) and the present (the leader of the Idéologues, Destutt de Tracy, and the purist Antonio Cesari), and is to some extent a forerunner to twentieth century linguistic concepts. Among his unpublished papers, there is a series of linguistic analyses, notes, outlines, and lists of Tuscan and Milanese terms compared, attributable to the period between his prima minuta (first draft) and the first published edition of the Promessi Sposi. Many annotations and notes derive from the period of the “rinsing in the Arno”, before and after the definitive version of his novel, between 1839 and 1845. His unpublished writings also include the Sentir Messa, an unfinished work started in response to a reviewer’s criticisms of the language used in Tommaso Grossi’s historical novel, Marco Visconti (1834). The expression sentir Messa was one of the expressions criticized by the reviewer as a Tuscanism, while Manzoni, in agreement with Grossi, reiterates in his essay that Tuscan was a language spoken and understood by all Italians and was therefore destined to become the nation’s unified language.

Fragment 4, f. 113c of the “book” on language that was to accompany the first draft of the novel [in A. Manzoni, Frammenti di un libro d’avanzo, University of Pavia, Department of Literary Science, 1983.