Why Greimas?

Abstract

A small number of factors influence our academic choices. As students, we all have inclinations, such as the subjects we like most; expectations, like the kind of expertise we want to acquire; a style of thinking, which contributes to feeling at ease, say, with cognitive semantics, but not with other branches. These factors orient our choices and help build up our repertoire, which may in turn substantiate them. That is not all, though. The imponderable may turn up and reinforce or divert previous choices. By chance, one day I came across Greimas’s “Structural Semantics”, a book that not only soothed some of my student’s restlessness, but also presented new perspectives, among which the “natural world” as having a role in the “birth” of meaning and an initial discussion on figurativity, both in the “natural world” and in discourse. The former, figurativity in the “natural world”, referred to the information our five senses provide us with about the world, while the latter dealt with the images evoked at the discourse level. Here, the complexity of the concept of figurativity is pointed out and presented from two points of view. Besides, it is suggested that figurativity is transversal to the generative trajectory of meaning, and thus provides the “energy” needed for the conversion from one level upwords (towards the surface). The intention of encouraging such debate underlies most of this contribution.