Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
On Meaning
Essays in semiotic theory, including the semiotic square, which maps the relations of contrariety, contradiction and implication between concepts.
Introduction
“On Meaning” (1970) collects essays from the second half of the 1960s in which Greimas extends structural semantics into a general semiotics. The most influential is “The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints”, written with François Rastier (1968), which introduces the semiotic square: from a term, for example “life”, one derives its contrary (“death”), the contradictories of both (“non-life”, “non-death”) and the relations of implication between them – a structure meant to map the logic of a text, a myth or an ideology. Further essays deal with the narrative grammar underlying stories, with myth, with the semiotics of the natural world and with modalities such as wanting, knowing and being able. A second volume, “Du sens II”, followed in 1983.
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