Essay on De Mauro and the relationship between language and culture. Discover how to write an essay on the linguist’s thought and ideas for the introduction, development and conclusion of the essay.
Track by theme on Tullio De Mauro: initial reflection
On January 5, 2017, Tullio De Mauro (born in 1932), one of the greatest Italian linguists, died . His death left a deep void in the Italian cultural panorama , although many today associate his name by metonymy only with the dictionary; because there is IL, the famous Italian-Latin dictionary , the GI, its Greek-Italian counterpart and there is De Mauro , the dictionary of the Italian language par excellence.
Not much thought is given to what it takes to compose a similar work and the objective it intends to pursue. Tullio De Mauro , in addition to being a linguist, was devoted to our literary culture , a heritage to be proud of. He was interested in the word, that logos from which everything begins, the nerve center where man discovers himself, because language gives shape to our thoughts, making them visible, tangible, communicable and, therefore, debatable. In fact, in Ten Theses for Democratic Linguistic Education (1975),
De Mauro states that ” the development of linguistic abilities has its roots in the development of the entire human being, from childhood to adulthood, and that is, in the possibilities of psychomotor growth and socialization, in the balance of affective relationships, in the kindling and maturation of intellectual interests and participation in the life of a culture and community “. All his research is based on this particular, profoundly humanistic axis. In fact, we read in the article by one of his students, Raffaele Simone:
Tullio de Mauro’s contribution was so brilliant and rich that the press struggled to describe it , and ultimately failed, getting by with insipid and imprecise formulas. He was described as “the man of the Italian language”, “the friend of the school”, “the professor of language and literature” (sic) and in other unlikely ways.
To get an idea of his contribution, one must imagine him as someone who combined “high” linguistic science, which he practiced as a master, with its reflections and outlets even at the most concrete levels, and who, starting from the crucial interest in language and communication, shed light on many more or less distant areas.
In this mix, De Mauro invested a culture in which the solid classical education (with even Risorgimento evocations and a strong Crocean component) was woven with the most advanced modernity; linguistics reached out to various sciences that it felt were similar to, that it was an expert in or that it sometimes flirted with (philosophy, mathematics, logic, physics, psychology, biology, computer science, economics, demography). (R. Simone, on l ‘ Espresso , 16 January 2017)
Reading documents and researching on the Internet
he relationship between language and culture is very close , always at the center of all the reflections of the great linguist. The world of culture immediately poured out obituaries (sic!): many words often pronounced out of pure duty. In this sea, however, those of President Mattarella are striking for their acuity and sensitivity : ” a mourning that affects our entire community (…) De Mauro was a passionate intellectual, a fine scholar, an Italian who did not hesitate, when asked, to put his experience and his abilities at the service of the institutions of the Republic (…) His testimony will remain in the country, in society, in universities, as a push to commitment and as a reinforcement of the educational value of school, so decisive for our future “.
Tullio De Mauro was, in fact, Minister of Education, one of the few to be truly competent on schools and universities : a practice that has not been in fashion lately. Before delving into some of his reflections, let’s read an excerpt from the profile written by Francesco Erbani for Repubblica:
” His linguistic contributions are irreplaceable. Both the more specialized ones and those that extend to broader horizons. The Linguistic History of United Italy published by Laterza on the occasion of the centenary of the Unification, in 1961, (republished several times, until the extension of the Linguistic History of Republican Italy in 2014, also by Laterza) is not a history of the Italian language , it is a history of Italians and of the language they speak, the history of how they gradually became masters of a common language , from illiterates that for the most part they were. It is the social, demographic and cultural history of a community, of the relationship between city and countryside, between small cities and large cities, of how internal emigration has been a gigantic factor in the consolidation of the unitary fabric, linguistic and not only, and of how, even proceeding at a gallop, the country has dragged along old and new forms of backwardness
De Mauro has long reflected on what a good basic culture means , which school should give to everyone, demonstrating how changes are necessary and must be pursued at all costs if we want to try to increase the awareness of Italian citizens not only of their historical-literary baggage (important, of course), but above all of their aptitude for reading the present, for knowing how to decipher and discuss it, so as to be able to improve in public participation and cooperation for a better society. Knowing how to use words, knowing how to give shape to one’s thoughts and understanding what we are told is a conditio sine qua non of every democracy. Commenting on Vittoria Gallina’s research on the illiteracy of Italians, De Mauro warned :
” Five out of a hundred Italians between the ages of 14 and 65 cannot distinguish one letter from another , one number from another: they are totally illiterate. Thirty-eight out of a hundred can do so, but they can only read simple writing with difficulty and decipher a few numbers.
Thirty-three pass this condition, but they stop here: a written text that concerns collective facts, also relevant in everyday life, is beyond the scope of their reading and writing skills, a graph with some percentage is an indecipherable icon. Among these, 12 percent of graduates. Only 20 percent of the Italian adult population possesses the minimum indispensable tools of reading, writing and calculation necessary to orient themselves in a contemporary society”.
The problem of language, its teaching and its relationship with basic culture , a compass that allows effective orientation in contemporary society, is starting to emerge better: ” Democracy lives if there is a good level of widespread culture . If this is not there, democratic institutions – although always better than totalitarianism and fascism – are empty forms”, De Mauro said in an interview with Piero Ricca for Il fatto quotidiano . What is worrying is not only the school that must work with maximum self-denial in a truly difficult context, but also the inter-family dialogue that is failing; people talk less and less at home, they read less and less. Therefore, the progressive detachment of Italian society from political changes also arises from this disinterest in dialogue and the exchange of opinions that has already matured within the home. Finding a remedy is not easy: the tools available remain the school and society, starting from its first cell, which is precisely the family.
And yet school remains essential in this process. “Italian has a more complicated mechanism than English or French, it requires control that school can offer. Even today, full awareness is acquired in high school, when these work well. Which is not always true: especially the final three years have remained far behind. The programs have not been updated and the system is too segmented into disciplines and pays little attention to transversal skills”. How do you judge the Renzi government’s reform project? I wouldn’t call it a reform. They are collateral measures that do not touch the overall system. It is positive that a prime minister is talking about school. Before him only Giovanni Giolitti did it . Outside of school, dramatic levels of illiteracy continue to be recorded. All the surveys on the real skills of Italians indicate that only a percentage just over 20 is able to understand not even very difficult sentences and to do operations that are barely more than basic. This data has been circulating for over a decade. They are updated and they appear to have worsened. But Renzi’s project does not take them into consideration. An appeal is made to families, but many families do not even have a book at home and there are now many studies that attest to a relationship between the academic performance of children and the number of books owned by parents. There is not the slightest mention of adult education, one of the conditions for children to learn more and better.
There are always many ideas circulating about the change in the Italian school system, but few appear truly convincing. Often teachers have to do it on their own, in a precarious balance between what must be done and what can be done. The progressive removal of resources from the world of school has certainly not favored solutions that have often remained only basic intentions, but not substantial changes: we talk about inclusiveness, about self-education, but often the resources, time and structures to be able to do it more effectively are lacking. The problem of school is truly a Gordian knot of our current times, a premise for any possible progress. Commenting on De Mauro ‘s important document from 1975, the aforementioned Ten Theses , Mario Ambel writes :
Other suggestions that should have been better understood in recent years need to be rethought and translated into effective educational practices. Schools continue to neglect the educational relationship , that is, the need to take cultural and human care of students , and they continue to underestimate the role of external contexts in learning dynamics. In relation to “reality” – that reality so strongly evoked in the Ten Theses as a permanent horizon of comparison – schools continue to oscillate between two equally fruitless extremes: on the one hand, they tend to ignore the external world, to oppose it with an often sterile primacy of knowledge as an end in itself and to exalt the intangible quality of disinterested knowledge; on the other, they bend to exalt the functionality of education to the external world, to employability, chasing simulations or emulations of reality that often end up making the school path an excessively adaptive segment of life with respect to a future that is otherwise largely unknowable.
But culture – and with it the school, if it wants to maintain, for everyone and not only for high school students, a cultural imprint – does not exist only to prepare, train, and coach for reality: culture and school have the task of observing reality, studying it, interpreting it, preparing to live it, but also subjecting it to criticism, imagining a different one, contributing to changing it, possibly for the better. ( Mario Ambel on
Lexical impoverishment
Returning to our language , it has already been underlined in the statistics provided previously that we are witnessing a truly worrying lexical impoverishment , in which we see a general failure that is especially affecting the new generations. Losing control over one’s language really means losing control of reality. The impoverishment has certainly been accelerated by the demands of increasingly rapid and superficial communication that does not allow time for reflection and research. Thus we are eliminating all difficult words, with uncertain meanings, and we are entrusting a few words with a new versatility and semantics. On January 4, 2017, a letter was delivered to the government by a group of university professors denouncing the serious situation of their students who make mistakes worthy of third grade.
The great culprit is always the school, but we have seen that it is not the only defendant. The problem is also in the basic attitude of the new generations towards the world that is too fast, chaotic and labyrinthine and the inability to draw from previous generations teachings perceived as effective and decisive. There almost seems to be a lack of credibility: not believing in previous generations and their examples means by extension not believing in the school that passes on their lesson in methods and styles. And yet, and this De Mauro strongly emphasized, if there is a place to start again it is precisely this tormented school that can represent the first democratic laboratory of our society, as long as the child is constantly educated to find in otherness and comparison the basic principle of fruitful cooperation and personal and interpersonal education. The risk is that of repeating sterile words, not bearers of meaning: empty words. Says De Mauro .
TALKING INTO THE EMPTY SOUND. Eclipses of the body and artificiality expose us to the risk of talking into the void. Talking does not go round in circles only if its contents are anchored, sooner or later, to a concrete experience. Especially in the learning phases, only in this way are meanings formed: starting from very specific senses and experienced in person, operationally, with the intervention not only of the ‘noble’ perceptive channels (sight, hearing), but also of the more rudimentary ones (touch, taste, smell). Understanding also occurs through processes of adaptation, of coming and going, between the flow of specific senses and the baggage of semantic potential of the words available to the receiver. Without circumscribed experiences identified by particular senses in which the meanings of the sentences of a speaker who does not talk into the void are concretized, the receiver risks accepting these sentences as empty formulas. And then to become a repeater of empty formulas himself, a risk already brilliantly captured many years ago by Georges Orwell (Politics and English Language, 1946).
The first consequence to draw is to try never to lose awareness of the relationship of continuity that links , immediately or indirectly, the most ethereal and abstract of meanings to concrete and immediate experience. The second consequence is to be able to understand how long the road is that leads from the most concrete and immediate experiences to the most abstract and mediated elaborations and this also helps us to understand how many are those who do not travel it all, but get lost along the way. A language is made in such a way that to some extent it is possible to communicate with words even beyond cultural distance, but this happens only in a limited way. The verbal game most dense with complex meanings goes round in circles for many. We must not despair: we are only using a very small part of the communication potential that a language offers us . We can make progress on the ancient path of mutual understanding and understanding and intelligence of the world.
As long as those who look into the depths of language see the need for it, if it does not want to limit its own function, to become an education in the word in all its potential. ( Tullio De Mauro , Educare alla parola ).
” He who speaks badly, thinks badly and lives badly, ” says Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa. Knowing how to use words means knowing how to reason and giving one’s reasoning already means giving a fruit, sometimes more immature, other times more mature, of one’s sensitivity to the world in which we live.
Outline for a theme on the linguist Tullio De Mauro
A structure is necessary. Use the first lines of your essay as an introduction, then present the topic and critically explore it, until you draw your conclusions. So:
- Introduction.
- Present the theme trying to make the reader understand the direction you want to give to your paper.
- Go deeper into the topic by analyzing it according to the various nuances that you are able to grasp from the documents that you have to relate to each other.
- Create perspectives to interpret the current cultural scenario.
- Conclusions.
Theme on De Mauro: the drafting of the text
Now that you have informed yourself about the topic, read and studied the documents, you can proceed to write the introduction, presentation of the topic, elaboration and conclusions.
Introduction to the topic on Tullio De Mauro
Depending on your taste, you can choose to refer to a particular event related to the topic , or literally “merge” the introduction and the presentation of the topic. Also choose the style you use carefully: if you proceed with short sentences, you will emphasize the more emotional aspect; with longer periods, instead, you will focus on the reasoning.
Presentation of the topic
Choose carefully how to present your thesis on the topic. The important thing is to make the reader understand how you will talk about the relationship between language and culture : since it is an important and difficult topic , you must necessarily document yourself well. Choose a precise line, so as not to fall into a mere listing of different visions. Create dynamism in your theme or in your essay .
Topic processing
Within the articles you find in the comments, you can find many ways to correctly interpret the phenomenon: remember to cite them correctly, that is, avoiding very long citations that weigh down your paper and take away space for your reflection. Once you have framed the phenomenon from many points of view, propose solutions that make sense: that is, that are feasible.
Conclusions to the topic on De Mauro
You are now at the conclusions. Reread your text carefully. Have you managed to create an essay that says something interesting? Also recheck the way you used the documents. Also check the spelling carefully. Good, hand it in.