Language and creativity: from De Mauro to Garroni and back

The main topic of the article is the reconstruction of the concept of creativity through the reflections of Tullio De Mauro and Emilio Garroni. The possibility of understanding creativity will emerge, on the one hand, as a willingness to change the code and on the other, as an adaptive function. I will try to show that there is a notion of creativity which is not general but plausible from an evolutionary point of view. Creativity becomes a survival strategy which guarantees humans and non- humans to be adequate and innovative in (almost) all circumstances. The actuality of the notion of creativity, so re- determined, can be seen in relation to the concept of cooperation, opening the future possibility of rethinking the scope of linguistic creativity within an interdisciplinary framework that takes into account the recent results of research in the field of comparative psychology.