Theoretical approximations in “Is the man who is tall happy?: An animated conversation with Noam Chomsky”: input/output systems and the greimasian concept of enunciation

Abstract

This article presents a discussion around the enunciator Michel Gondry, noting the interest of the French filmmaker on the American linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory. Our goal, without the intent of being exhaustive, is to reflect on some issues regarding Gondry’s knowledge on Chomsky’s linguistic theory and how his creative process presents that knowledge in the film “Is the man who is tall happy?: an animated conversation with Noam Chomsky”. Thus, our intention is to conduct a brief dialogue that allows for an analysis under French Semiotics, approximating concepts within this theory and a conceptual interpretation of Chomsky’s Generative Grammar expressed by Gondry’s film. For this discussion, we take into account the concepts of merge (Chomky 1992, 1995) and the input/output systems (Chomsky [2012] 2014), and how they are presented in Gondry’s work through the concept of enunciation, contained in the Dictionary of Semiotics, by Greimas and Courtés (1983).