Ricerc@Sapienza

After an initial interest in a zoosemiotic perspective, European semiotics focused exclusively on human language, relegating the communicative performances of non-human animal species below the "semiotic threshold" (Eco 1975). However, ethological research in recent decades has made enormous progress that has shown the sophistication of the communication codes of many species (firstly primates and apes, but also dolphins, crows and other species phylogenetically distant from Homo sapiens) .

In the last decades, by virtue of the overcoming of the Saussurean vulgata, especially after the publication of the Ecrits de linguistique générale, the reflections on the double essence of the language has revealed the inadequacy of the dichotomies from which classical structuralism arose. In this new context, the couples nature/culture, langue/parole, synchrony/diachrony, syntagmatic/associative etc. appear as methodological premises or as antinomies which have to be understood in dialectical terms, so that they cannot be solved, but only pragmatically composed.