The article recounts the story of the research concerning language hosted at the Catholic University in Milan since its foundation and even earlier, thanks to its founder, Agostino Gemelli. According to the ideal of the gradual ascent from experimental research to rational inquiry, from observed particulars to scientific and philosophical explanations, Gemelli develops electro-acoustical research on the human voice through his long-term search regarding personality. On the philosophical side, the data which are used as a point of departure are the texts of the authors themselves in the history of thought, with the discovery of their questions and answers, which are sometimes surprisingly alike in spite of their quite diverse theoretical or extra-theoretical frameworks. In between, Natural Language Processing (NLP) encounters the requirements of semantic annotation, fostered by semantic theory: an investigation which began in the sixties and is still in progress.
Although all these trends belong to a perennial, context independent, quest for the essence and function of language, there are indeed certain projects which aim to place language and languages in public, situated contexts, especially those dealing with socio- and cultural-political side effects. The article attempts to highlight the golden thread unifying different epistemological and disciplinary traditions, the recurrent commitment to instrumental, technologically assisted research, and the core function attributed to language in human life, under the shared banner of realis
