Tullio De Mauro "paleo-crociano"
This paper aims at investigating the crucial role played by Benedetto Croce’s philosophy in Tullio De Mauro’s early linguistic thought. As a matter of fact, De Mauro has often expressed his own debt towards Croce’s “general linguistics”, that is his Aesthetics and Philosophy of language. During the Fifties of the last century, De Mauro proposed a new interpretation of Croce’s linguistic inquiries, pointing out a clear-cut fracture between the “first” and the “second” Croce, between the systematic and the rhapsodic writings of the great Italian philosopher.