What is Semiotics

The generative semiotics of the 'Paris School' is based on that linguistic tradition which originated from De Saussure and Hiemslev, and whose most representative member is Algirdas Greimas. This 'continental' semiotics structures a relation of opposition with the philosophical Anglo-Saxon semiotics funded by the American Pierce. According to the generative hypothesis, semiotics is the study of systems and processes of signification. The basilar postulate is that the signification of a text can be articulated in different levels, from the most abstract to the concrete, along the 'generative trajectory'. Hjelmslevian theory is a theory which, further developed by Greimas, brings towards the study of narrative concatenations. That of Pierce, instead, points generally on logic argumentation, and concentrates on a conception of sense and the production of meaning which is interpretative-inferential. The concept of sign of Pierce is in fact pre-saussurian and it does not recognize the articulation, internal to the sign, of significant and significate. The strength of Hjemslev's model is the description of the relation significant/significate in form of expression and form of content, without contradicting the internal articulation theorized by Saussure. According to Pierce, on the other side, every sign is remanding to another sign in inferential way. Then, hjemslevian theory is not a theory of signs, while Pierce's is. Yet cross-overs between the two theories are not missing, nor they will. Aim of semiotics is first of all that of providing a method to decompose different components of action, in order to construct models to be general enough. The instruments of semiotics are useful to study not only the field of action in its specific sense, rather that of transformation and deviation of this action, following a conception, at least for what semiotics of greimasian influence is concerned, which interprets the act starting from its intrinsic strategic nature. Semiotics of French school, of structuralist orientation, moved its first steps from anthropology and the analysis of story-tale, besides linguistics. It tried to analyze the mythical and cultural universes decomposing them in systems of values and, at the same time, it developed narratologic analysis starting from Russian formalism. From these basis a narrative model was born, and this was wide enough to function as a general grid of analysis of processes and of action's dynamics. The binary and structuralist conception conceives the constitution of languages, up to the construction of sense and signification, through differences: sense would not be given in any positive and atomistic manner, but through disparity and relations between differences. A structure is said to be binary when, at minimum, it can be defined as the relation between two terms. Any value, or component, that is constructing a significate, would be given by the difference in relation to another value. In this sense we can say that semiotics pretends to resemble more a chemistry than a physics of sense: it is in fact about establishing valences and values of bonds between particles of meaning... Semiotics retakes, and makes its own, a conception which was typical of linguistics, from Saussure on: that of 'negative' sense. Sense, meaning, is only given as negative gap, difference between its parts. This is a sort of epistemological foundation: all the categories constructed by semiotics are conceived as oppositions: from those deep between differential values of significate, to the articulation between plane of expression and plane of content. One of the instruments, among those elaborated by greimasian semiotics, which better represents the generative conception of the trajectory of signification, is the 'semiotic square'. Static and dynamic representation of the first articulations of sense, this analytic apparatus constitutes the schema of the formal development of categorial system of opposition of a semantic category. It is a topography of relations and operations which constitutes the minimal conditions of the production of meaning. The semiotic square structures itself starting from two fundamental oppositions: the 'qualitative' oppositions are correlations between two terms qualitatively different, which take the name of contraries, the 'privatives', whose terms are defined contradictory, are correlations between terms trough negation of properties. There is, besides these, another relation, which results from the other two, and which unites with a vertical one of the terms of negation with the contrary of what is negated: this relation, which is univocally vectorial, is defined 'complementarity' or 'participation'. We will then have four isotopic terms, inter-defined by three types of relations and two possible operations. The semiotic square represents the shape of difference in itself.

Eleonora Maria Irene Oreggia, Bologna 2002
Translation Amsterdam 2009