Tullio De Mauro. Una semiologia a base semantica

Tullio de Mauro was one of the most representative intellectuals in the feld of philosophical refection on language that Italian culture has expressed in the last sixty years. Scientifcally multifaceted personality, he animated the cultural and political debate in our country, operating not only within the universities where he taught, but holding political-institutional and scientifc organization positions and activating, since his youthful years, a vital and uninterrupted channel of communication and interaction between the academic world and civil society. We retrace in this contribution the main stages in the formulation of the Demaurian theory of meaning, which, beginning with works published in the second half of the 1950s, would come to full maturity over the next two decades and culminate in "Minisemantica dei linguaggi non verbali e delle lingue" (1982).