Ricerc@Sapienza

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. According to De Mauro’s own lecture, the so-called “second” Croce offered a new perspective concerning historical languages as practical institutions and opened a more operative dialogue with the linguists. When De Mauro edited and commented Saussure’s Cours (1967), thanks to his “Crocianism”, he created a fruitful synthesis between the individualist and the collective position in relation to the Saussurean theory. The Neo-Idealist legacy allowed Tullio De Mauro to acquire a very original idea of historical and synchronic semantics, which he outlined in one of his masterpieces, namely the Minisemantica (1982).