Ferruccio Rossi-Landi: language, society and semiotics

The work of Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, which began in the fifties and ended in the mid-eighties, ranged through philosophy and linguistics to semiotics. My essay aims to provide a systematic presentation of the contribution of RossiLandi’s work, taking into account the various theoretical stages that led him to conceive and study language from such an original point of view. Through his "homological schema", material and linguistic production are conceived to be the result of a single process that is particular to human beings and that can best be understood in terms of work and trade. The essay focuses particularly on the critical debate that surrounded Rossi-Landian theory, presenting some of the objections of the scholar’s contemporaries together with his reactions to them, as well as touching on more recent interpretations