La dimensione sociale del linguaggio nei dibattiti italiani del dopoguerra

An important topic in twentieth-century Italian linguistic studies is the controversial relationship between the individual and the social character of language. Croce's theory of the absolute individuality of the linguistic act, on the one hand, and Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between langue and parole, on the other, constitute the poles between which glottologists rooted in the methodological tradition of Graziadio Isaia Ascoli have tried to redefine the object of linguistic research. This paper focuses in particular on the last phase of the debate, inaugurated by Idealism and Realism in the Sciences of Language (1946) by Giovanni Nencioni (1911-2008) and concluded with Introduction to Semantics (1965) by Tullio De Mauro (1932-2017). [Publisher's text]