Abstract
This article concentrates on demonstrating how Greimas and Geninasca, while sharing the same epistemological principles, have positioned their respective research at different levels and pioneered two distinct semiotic projects, one orientated towards the langue, the other towards the parole, as defined by F. de Saussure. For Greimas indeed, the coherence and intelligibility of texts depends on one – and only one – elementary and universal structure of signification. This structure, the model of which is the semiotic square, is supposed to be prior to, and independent of any enunciative activity. Within the general framework of Greimas’ semiotic theory, it lies in the deep structures, located in the langue. Geninasca’s approach is different. He aims at conceptualising different strategies of coherence allowing to construct texts as ‘discourses’, that is, as semiotic objects. In doing so, he approaches the emergence of signification as the result of an activity attributable to a subject of enunciation. Favouring the surface structures, he assigns the semiotic theory the task to describe the “prerequisites for building discourses”, which is a way to focus on what Saussure calls parole. In this light, the semiotic theory concentrates on a different series of questions. Rather than tackling the problem of the conversion between different levels of depth, constitutive of Greimas’ generative path of signification, it addresses the question of the integration, by a subject of enunciation, of multiple languages, rationalities and ways of creating sense and meaning.
Keywords
semiotic theory; discourse; rationality; Greimas; Geninasca