- Michela Tardella
- XVIII (2023), 1
- Saggio
Tullio de Mauro was one of the most representative intellectuals in the field of philosophical reflection on language that Italian culture has expressed in the last sixty years. Scientifically 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 scientific 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).