Abstract:

Over time, Structural Semantics has become a kind of monument, a “classic” that is often merely welcomed from afar. Is it still necessary to read this text which takes us back fifty years? Yes, because the potentialities as well as the problems of the present semiotics are essentially related to the options around which this founding work is articulated: The adoption of a generative perspective, a lasting alteration of the problem of meaning on a theory of narrativity, but also an essential place attributed to perception as the basis of the comprehension of meaning. The subsequent developments and extensions, made either by Greimas, his collaborators or his successors, show a relatively coherent development process in which the new positions, far from invalidating the original project, have, on the contrary, made it possible to enrich it. The “reflections on the actantial models”, the subject of the last chapters of the book, succeed ten years later in a narrative grammar that presents itself universal in scope. The strategic choice made in favour of this approach had to result in the provisional storage of another problem, which was also contemplated from the outset. For the interrogation of the first pages of Structural Semantics talks about the “situation of man” attacked “from the prenatal age to death” by meanings that “appeal to him from everywhere”. In fact, Greimas reminds us ten years later in his Dictionnaire, “the natural world is a figurative language whose figures are made of” sensible qualities “[which] act directly - without linguistic mediation - on man”. Hence the possibility of conceiving a semiotics “of experience”: from the experience of a meaning, not deciphered from the surface of texts but experienced from our relations with “the things themselves”. Thus, in parallel with the construction of the “semio-narrative”, Greimas did not cease at any moment to encourage the work on semiotics directly related to the perception of the sensitive world (visual semiotics, semiotics of space, semiotics of gesture), and more generally to call for the constitution of a semiotics “of the natural world”. There are therefore good reasons to read, or to re-read his Structural semantics.

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