Algirdas Julien Greimas

Works

• 1966Structural Semantics

  Develops a semantics of minimal units of meaning (semes) and the actantial model of narrative.

• 1970On Meaning

  Essays in semiotic theory, including the semiotic square, which maps the relations of contrariety, contradiction and implication between concepts.

Position

Greimas transferred structural linguistics to the analysis of meaning. In “Structural Semantics” (1966), starting from Saussure and Louis Hjelmslev, he broke meaning down into minimal features (semes) and identified recurrent “isotopies” that make a text readable as coherent. From Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the Russian folktale, Étienne Souriau’s dramatic situations and Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myth he derived the actantial model: six roles – subject and object, sender and receiver, helper and opponent – that underlie narratives. In “The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints” (with François Rastier, 1968), reprinted in “On Meaning” (1970), he developed the semiotic square, which relates a term to its contrary, its contradictory and the implications between them. Later work with Joseph Courtés (an analytical dictionary of semiotics, 1979) and Jacques Fontanille (“The Semiotics of Passions”, 1991) extended the model to modalities and emotions. The Paris School shaped literary studies, the analysis of media and advertising, and biblical exegesis in France, Italy and Latin America. Paul Ricœur examined Greimas’s narrative grammar closely in “Time and Narrative II” (1984) and argued that its logical model depends on a prior, temporal understanding of action that it cannot account for itself; other critics faulted its formalism and the abstraction of its terminology.

Life & context

Algirdas Julien Greimas was born on 9 March 1917 in Tula, Russia, to Lithuanian parents, who returned to independent Lithuania after the First World War. He studied law in Kaunas and from 1936 to 1939 French linguistics in Grenoble. Back in Lithuania he did military service and during the war taught at a secondary school in Marijampolė. In 1944 he left for France, where in 1949 he took his doctorate at the Sorbonne with a thesis on the vocabulary of fashion around 1830. He then taught French in Alexandria (1949–58), where he met Roland Barthes, afterwards in Ankara and Istanbul, and from 1962 at the University of Poitiers. In 1965 he became director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris; until his retirement in 1985 his seminar formed the core of the “Paris School” of semiotics. He was among the founders of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (1969). Alongside his theoretical work he wrote studies of Lithuanian mythology, published in Lithuanian and French, and essays for the Lithuanian émigré press. He died in Paris on 27 February 1992.

Further main works

• Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text (Maupassant. La sémiotique du texte, 1976)
• Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary (with J. Courtés, Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, 1979)
• Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology (Des dieux et des hommes, 1985)
• The Semiotics of Passions (with J. Fontanille, Sémiotique des passions, 1991)