Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method

by: A.-J Greimas

Translated by:
Daniele McDowel
Ronald Schleifer,
and Alan Velie
Contents
Introduction, xi
A Note on the Translation, iv

Chapter I
The Conditions for Scientific Semantics

1. The Situation of Semantics

a. Signification and the human sciences
b. A poor relation: semantics

2. Signification and Perception

a. The first epistemological choice
b. A qualitative description
c. The first operational concepts

3. Signifying Ensembles and Natural Languages

a. Classification of signifiers
b. The correlation between signifiers and signifieds
c. "Natural" significations and "artificial" significations
d. The privileged status of natural language

4. The Hierarchial Levels of Language

a. The closure of the linguistic ensemble
b. The logical levels of signification
c. Semantics as language
d. The epistemological level
e. Symbolic notation
Chapter II
The elementary structure of signification

1. Continuities and discontinuities

2. The first conception of structure
3. Conjunction and disjunction
4. Elementary structures
5. Semantic axes
6. Relationship
7. Semic articulations
8. Models of semic architecture
9. Forms and substance
10. Semes and Lexemes
11. Second definition of structure
12. The whole and the parts

Chapter III
Language and Discourse

1. Signification and communication

2. Semic systems
3. Semes and lexemes
4. The plane of discourse
5. Manifestations of relationships

Chapter IV
Manifested Signification

1. The sememe
a. Units of communication and units of signification
b. The lexeme: a stylistic constellation
c. The definition of the sememe
2. The Nuclear Figure
a. The first nucleus of "head" extremity
b. The second nucleus of "head": spheroidity
c. The common semic nucleus

3. Classemes
a. Contextual semes
b. Lexemes and sememes
c. The definition of classemes
d. Towards the semantic level of language

4. Instrumental concepts

Chapter V
The Semiological Level

1. Approaches and approximations

a. The autonomy of semiology
b. Anthropocentric lexematism
c. The reserved domain: symbolism
d. Linguistics and the imaginary

2. The status of the semiological

a. The symbolic and the semiological
b. Pierre Guiraud's "protosemanticism"
c. The semiological and the bioanagogical

3. The possibilities of semiological description

a. The construction of languages in applied linguistics
b. The level of generality
c. The descriptive procedure
Chapter VI
Isotopy of Discourse

1. The heterogeneity of discourse

a. The isotopy of the message
b. Variation of isotopies
c. The dimensions of isotopic contexts

2. The Metalinguistic Workings of Discourse

a. Expansion and definition
b. Condensation and denomination
c. Translative denomination
d. The double function of classemes
e. Analysis of the figurative denominations
f. Analysis of translative denomination
g. Definitional analysis
h. The construction of sememes
i. The isomorphism of figures

3. Conditions for Establishing Isotopy

a. Oblique definition
b. Commentaries on the world
c. The closure of the text
d. From the individual text to the collective corpus
e. Isotopism and variations

4. Multivocal Discourse
a. The manifestation of complex isotopy
b. The symbolic ambivalence in literature
c. Isotopies and their reading
Chapter VII
The Organization of the Semantic Universe

1. The immanent universe of signification

a. An epistemological double approach
b. Induction and deduction
c. The empirical approach to the immanent universe
d. Systems and morphemes

2. The manifested universe of signification

a. The content
b. The combinatory
c. The strategic choice
d. The opening of the corpus of sememes
e. Abstract and concrete sememes
f. Incompatibilities

3. Discourse
a. Lexicalization and grammaticalization
b. Differences in expression and identities of content
c. Communication
d. The organization of messages

Chapter VIII
The description of signification

1. Manifestation and discourse

a. The dichotomy of the manifested universe
b. Fundamental isotopies
c. The syntactic combinatory
d. Affabulation and "nonsense"
2. Discursive manifestation
a. Pragmatic bases of organization
b. Modes of the presence of discursive manifestation
c. Semantic microuniverses
d. The typology of microuniverses
e. Predicates and actants
f. Actantial categories
g. Logical syntax and semantic syntax
h. The modal character of actantial categories
i. A linguistic epistemology

3. Figurative Manifestation and Nonfigurative Manifestation

a. One example: poetic communication
b. The implicit and the explicit
c. The nonfigurative
d. Towards a scientific metalanguage
e. The verification of models of description

Chapter XI
The procedures of description

1. The constitution of the corpus

a. Goals and procedures
b. The corpus
c. The text
d. Elimination or extraction?
e. The inventories
f. Individual and collective inventories
g. Strata and durations
2. Normalization
a. The homogeneity of the description
b. The objectification of the text
c. The elementary syntax of description
d. The lexematics of description

3. Construction
a. The construction of the model: reduction and structuration
b. Simple reductions
c. Complex reductions
d. Semantics and stylistics
e. Structuration
f. Homologation and generation
g. Instituted contents and their organization

Chapter X
Reflections on Actantial Models

1. Two levels of description

2. The actants in linguistics
3. The actants of the Russian Folktale
4. The actants in the theatre
5. The actantial category "Subject" vs. "Object"
6. Actantial category "Sender" vs. "Receiver"
7. The actantial category "Helper" vs. "Opponent"
8. The actantial mythical model
9. The "Thematic" Investment
10. The Economic investmenr
11. Actants and Actors
12. The Energetic character of the actants
13. The actantial model and the psychoanalytical critique
14. The psychoanalytical actantial models

Chapter XI
Searching for Models of Transformation

1. Reduction and Structuration

a. The organization of functions
b. The inventory of functions
c. The coupling of functions
d. The contract
e. The test
f. The hero's absence
g. Alienation and reintegration
h. Test and their consequences
i. The results of reduction

2. Interpretations and definitions

a. Achronic and diachronic elements of the narrative
b. The diachronic status of the test
c. The dramatic energy of the narrative
e. The achronic signification of the narrative
f. The transformational model
g. The narrrative as mediation

3. The Transformational Model and Psychodrama

a. From the collective to the individual
b. The initial compensating structure
c. The beginning of the contest
d. The development of the test
e. The accomplishment of the test
f. The problem of recognition and reward
g. The figurative manifestation of the model
h. The scope of the trasformational model

Chapter XII
A Sample Description

1. General principles
a. The chosen example: the universe of Bernanos
b. The constitution of the text by extraction
c. The choice of the isotopy

2. Existence as Milieu
a. The forms of manifestation and the types of analysis
b. Life and death
c. Fire
d. Water
e. The constitutional model

3. Existence as Stake
a. Disease
b. The bestiary
c. Lies
d. Transitive lies
e. Economical reductions
f. Intransitive lies
g. Truths

4. Comparisons and Choices of Models

a. Absence of homogeneity
b. The comparison of results
c. Models and contects
d. The modal character of the functional model

5. The Dialectical Conception of Existence

a. Modalities
b. Bernanosian detail
c. Bernanosian assertion
d. The dialectical algorithm
e. History and permanence

Notes
Introduction

Algirdas-Julien Greimas is a linguist and a semiotician

associated with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales. His work has been quite important in France, but
until recently only a few of his essays have appeared in English.
He began his career as a lexicographer, but his major work is
Semantique stucturale (1996), followed by a collection of essays,
Du sens (1970), Maupassant (1976), and (with Joseph Courtes)
Semiotique: Dictionnaire raisonne de la therie du langage (1979),
translated as Semiotics and Language (1982).1 With the
publication of Semantique structurale he was recognized as an
important figure in the structuralist movement, and his
seminal article, "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints,"
written with Francois Rastier and published in Yale French
Studies in 1968, gave his work some currency in Anglo-
American literary work. Fredric Jameson's Prison-House of
Language virtually begins and ends with readings of Greimas,
and Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics devotes an important
chapter to the Semantics.
Until now Greimas has remained one of the few
important structuralist theoreticians unavailable in English. In
some ways the cause of this is clear: Structurale semantics is a
difficult and techinical work, its final chapter is based on an
obscure dissertation on a novelist little known in America, and
sections are written in a style that is difficult in its allusiveness.
Yet it is time, we believe, for a translation of Structural semantics,
because well after its publication, interest in structuralism
remains strong; the major influences on Greimas--Ferdinand

1

de Saussure, Louis Hjelmslev, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roman
Jakobson--remain important figures in twentieth-century
intellectual life; and, finally, the appearance of a translation of
a structuralist text at this distance from its publication gives us
the opportunity to reread structuralism retrospectively and
understand its successors--Levi-Strauss's ongoing work,
Barthes's reimagining of his work, and Derrida's
deconstruction of the structuralist enterprise--with a sense of
their relations to their origins.
Moreover, Greimas offers us a language--a method--as
well as an occasion for this reevaluation. What is clearest in
hindsight is the scientific project of the structuralist movement,
its overwhelming faith in logic, calculation, and the power of
the intellect. Levi-Strauss is preeminent among the
structuralists for this combination of scientific and logical
rigor and faith in its efficacies, and Greimas, as I will argue,
probably owes more to his work than to anyone else's. In any
case, the Semantics can be understood as a model of
structuralism, an attempt, as Greimas himself says, at its
method, and as such we can see in it, by translating it now,
models too of where structuralism has gone. This text offers a
method of analysis which help us to recognize the weak spots-
-what Paul de Man calls the "blindness" and what Jameson
calls the "unconscious"--that contribute to the conscious
insights of structuralism.
This, in any case, will form part of my argument.
Greimas's intention in Structural Semantics is to develop a
method to analyze and account for meaning; he attempts to
outline a grammar and syntax for signification. In so doing he
examines may kind of languages--folktales, psychodramas,
philosophy, and so forth--to understand narrative discourse in
terms of language itself, that is to say, in terms of its own
structure. His semantics is, in some sense, not a linguistic
semantics at all, but a rather more ambitious project aiming,
with its own synecdochic use of discourse to stand for the
whole meaningful language, to account for meaning in general.
This way Stephen Ullman ranks him among those--Rudolf
Carnap, C.K. Odgen, and I.A. Richards are others--who deal
in philosophical rather than linguistic semantics.2 Greimas
does not seek to explore--that is, exhaustively describe and
account for--the logic of meaning (of significance) in language;
rather, in examining discourse, he seeks to describe and
account for the problem of significance in human affairs. His
aim is not to learn about the logic of language as much as it is
to use language to explore the nature of human significance.
If the first project is that of semiotics, then the second project-
-Greimas's Structural Semantics, is that of semiology.

Note: The distinction between semiology and semiotics is at best

ambiguous, yet it is important, as we shall see, for assessing
the success or failure of Greimas's project. Saussure defines
semiology as "a science that studies the life of signs within society....., it
would be a part of social psychology." Charles S. Peirce defines
semiotics as "the logic of general meaning." Citing of the sign,
Pierre Guiraud notes: "Saussure emphasize the social function
of the sign, Peirce its logical function. But the two definitions
are strictly parallel and semiology and semioticcover, today, the
same discipline, Eurpean using the first term, Anglo-Saxons
the second." Marc Eli Blanchard also marks the difference
throughout Description: Sign, Self, Desire, where he usually uses

2

semiology to designate the internal relations between the
elements of language within language and semiotics to refer to "the
non-sign, non-symbolic process, which helps generate desire
and fulfill the wish, as against a sign, symbolic (structural)
process which represses it, while ordering it."3 Although it
reverses the distinction I am making, Blanchard's definition
owes much to Greimas whi, in Chapter V, is at great pains to
demonstrate the differences and similarities between the
"semiological level" and "symbolism". Throughout the
Semantics Greimas continually distinguishes structural
semantics form "psychology" (II.io, VI.i.a; IX.i.b; X. i4)--in
this way he attempts to distinguish linguistics from "social
psychology"--yet his project is more ambitious than (semiotic
project of) a logical grammar of the relations between the
elements of signification. He attempts, instead, (the
semiological project of) the method of meaning.

In Structuralist Poetics Jonathan Culler offers a persuasive

and devastating description of what he calls Greimas's failure,
and he suggest the "ways in which he fails cast doubt on the
validity of the project itself: it may be impossible, in principle
as well as in practice, to construct a model which would derive
the meaning of a text or a set of texts from the meaning of
lexical ites."4 Yet the failure Culler demonstrates takes semiotics
(the logic of signs) rather than semiology (the problem of
meaning) as its measure. The difference, as Greimas describes
it here and elsewhere, is the difference between the natural and
the human sciences. "If the natural sciences," Greimas writes,

3

4

"ask questions in order to understand how man and the world
are, the human sciences pose the question, more or less
explcitly, of what both of them signify" (I.i.a). In Structural
Semantics the very subtitle, An Attempt at a Method, indicates that
the book will explore human ways of understanding as much
as "how man and the world are: "This is why," Greimas writes,
"the concern that will appear in the following pages will be,
not that of pushing as far as possible the effort of formalizing
a descriptive semantic language, which the status of a self-
sufficient discipline would require, but, on the contrary, that
of formulating the most general procedures of description,
usable in the initial stage at least, in the freatest number of
domains" (IX.i.a).
To this end Greimas is indeed philosophical. He takes
his place among a number of French thinkers--Levi-Strauss in
athropology, Roland Barthes in literary criticism, Michel
Foucault in history, Jacques Derrida in metaphysics--who all
discover that their fields imply questions and problems that
have to do with the nature of signification altogether. Those
thinkers are sometimes called "structuralists," sometimes
"post-structuralists"--the link between these terms is
something to which I shall return--and they all, to one extent
or another, attempt to elaborate the human sciences, all of which,
Greimas says, are "sciences of signification" (IX. i.a): "From
the world of things, from which we borrow our objects of
study," Greimas says,"we pass automatically into the world of
signification [which], lends itself to the procedures of
decription elaborated by linguistics" (V.I.d). That is, linguistics
and its attempt to systematize the structure of language is
taken as amodel for the human sciences in an attempt to
systematize the structures of meaning.
 The central aspect of the linguistic model--the structural
model--is the "diacritical" or "differential" definition of
elements of a language developed by Saussure. Saussure
argued that the elements of a language--phonemes,
morphemes, and so forth--are not "substances," but "forms,"
and forms that are generated out of opposition to other forms
in language in a system, or "structure," of differences. That is,
cat is recognized not because of any inherent quality of the
sound cat--not by virtue of difference from what it is not. This
difference is without poles: cat is not a positive pole to which
cut is negatively opposed; rather, cat and cut are mutually
constitutive in a system--a "structure"--of differences. Here is
how Saussure says it:

Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to

this: in language there are only differences. Even more
important: a difference generally implies positive terms
between which the difference is set up; but in language there
are only differences without positive terms.5

Thus the difference between cat and cut exists in a system

where each sound, word, or phrase is neither thinkable nor
recognizable without other elements in the system (caught, cot,
sat); they participate in one another, and none can be said to
be the first positive term of the opposition. They are in what
Greimas calls "a relation of reciprocal presupposition" (see
Chapter II, "The Elementary Structure of Signification," for
Greimas's elaboration of this concept).

5

 Early in Structural Semantics Greimas calls those who
owe a debt to Saussure for his rethinking of the notion of
identity in diacritical terms--for his structuring of all signifying
experience--"the French School of Antrophology" (I.2.a)
because Greimas takes Levi-Strauss as their leader and his
important essay. "The Structural Study of Myth" as a central
statement of their diacritical, or structural, procedure. Greimas
defines structure in Chapter II as something that requires two
terms so that the relations and the differences between them
can be perceived. Such a definition is Saussurean--it follows
Levi-Strauss reading of myth--and with it, as well as his title,
Greimas self-consciously includes his own work with that of
Levi-Satrauss and other French structuralists. As he says in his
introductory chapter, he is attempting to bring to semantics a
systematic attention that will cross science and humanism, the
precision and impersonality of "mathematical logic and logic
iteself" and the "qualitative references" of literature and
history (I.I.b).

I. Scientific Semantics
Nevertheless, Greimas is seeking to develop a scinece in
iStructural Semantics--he never questions that the human
sciences are, indeed, science--whose aim is to create what he
calls "techiniques of description and discovery" (IX.3.c).
"Meaning," Roman Jakobson has repeated throughout his
career, "is the translation of a sign into another system of
signs," and in this volume Greimas attempts to develop a
scientific method to describe and transcode signification into
a scientific system of signs, a scientific language: a "systematic,
exact, and generalizing" language that joins description and
discovery. The scientific goal of his project is everywhere
present: semantics, this whole project argues, is part of the
human sciences, which themselves can be developed parallel
to the natural sciences. In his Prolegomena to the Theory of
Language Louis Hjelmslev defines this aim precisely and
eloquently, and since Greimas considers the "Prolegomena to be
the most beautiful linguistic text" he has ever read," I will
quote it at length: The search for such an aggregating and
integrating constancy is sure to be opposed by a certain
humanistic tradition...[in whose] view, humanistic, as opposed
to natural, phenomena are non-recurrent and for that very
reason cannot, like natural phenomena, be subject to exact and
generalizing treatment. In the field of the humanities,
consequently, there would have to be a different method--
namely, mere description, which would be nearer to poetry
than to exact science--...in which the phenomena pass by, one
by one, without being interpreted through a system....
[But] a priori it would seem to be a genereally valid
thesis that for every process there is a corresponding system, by
which the process can be analyzed and described by menas of
a limited number of premises. It must be assumed that any
process can be analyzed into a limited number of elements
recurring in various combinations. Then, on the basis of this
analysis, it should be possible to order these elements into
classes according to their possibilities of combination. And it
should be further possible to set up a general and exhaustive
calculus of the possible combinations. A history so established
should rise above the level of mere primitive description to
that of systematic, exact, and generalizing science, in the
theory of which all events [possible combinations of elements]
are foreseen and the conditions for their realization
established.
 It seems incontestable that, so long as the humanities
have not tested this thesis as a working hypothesis, they have
neglected their most important task, that of seeking to
establish the humanistic studies as a science.6

With such assumptions Greimas criticizes psychoanalysis in

Chapter X for failing to be exact and systematic: he argues that
psychoanalysis fails to be scientifically established because
"the corpus of instrumental concepts elaborated by
psychoanalysis is quite heterogeneous" and because it gathers
material rather than constructing models (X. i4). Since
psychoanalysis has established "a ametaphoric procedure for
[its] conceptualization, ... It yealds to the constant and
'unconscious' temptation of taking metaphors for realities"
and "closes the way... to the construction of a methodological
meta-language" (X.i4).
These two problems are, of course, related, and
together they define Greimas's project: to create a "meta-
langue"--or a hierarchy of metalanguages--whose instrumental
concepts are homogeneous and can, in fact, be used to
construct models to describe and foresee, as Hjelmslev says,
the place of meaning in language. In "Du sens" Greimas
writes:

If we reduce the problem of meaning to its minimum

dimension---that is to say, to the transcoding of significations-
-and if we say that these transcodings occur naturally but
obscurely, we can then ask ourselves whether scientific activity
in this domain must not consist in elaborating techniques of

6

transposition which allow us to effect transcodings artificially
but clearly. Consequently, semiotic description of significance
is the construction of an adequate artificial language.7

Psychoanalysis, Greimas says, is "wrongly considered as

'scientifically' established" (X.i4) because while it does
elaborate techniques of transposition, it fails to distinguish
adequately between its object of investigation and its language
of investigation: "There are finally." Greimas writes,
"mythological models such as the Oedipus myth, which Freud
first used metaphorically to describe certain situations rather
than complex structures and of which he later drew the typical
character" (X.i4).
This distinction is of central importance to Greimas,
and he defines it as the general difference between scientific and
semiotic forms. In Structural Semantics and elsewhere this
becomes the distinction between the semantic level (le niveau
semantique) and the semiological level (le niveau semiologique), but level
itself is really one of the instrumental concepts of Greimas's
oroject--it is embedded in Hjelmslev definition of science--
because the concept of level is absolutely necessary for an
understanding of structure: the concept of level allows for "the
opposition of the system to the process" of language (IV. 2.e).8
In fact, Greimas defines the manifestation of language "as the
reunion of two levels of language, semiological and semantic"
(VII.I.b). As we shall see, the semiological level articulates the
elements of the system as opposed to those of the process, and as such in

7

8

semantics it is related to the invariant forms of the "minimal
units of signification" (which Greimas designates semes)

Note: The fact that Greimas notes in passing that semiological

models raise questions about the origins of language (v.2B)
distinguishes the semiological from the semiotic.

The semantic level is related to the variant forms of semes. These

minimal units, the semes, and the two levels which organize
them are always only immanent in language. As Greimas says
in "La Structure semantique".

The form of the substance that we will call semiotic must be

different from what we could call the scientific form of the same
substance. Thus, for example, chemistry as a science is a
particular formal organization of a domain of a given
substance in such a way that chemical elements are the
minimal units (that is, the distinctive features), the
combination of which produces on the plane of manifestation
one of the aspect of what we call, for a lack of a better term,
the world of common sense [that is, the "sensible world", see
Structural Semantics, I.2.b]. Chemistry is the scientific form the
superficial manifestation of which is used to construct, by
means of a new terminology. the semiotic form which must,
across all kinds of language, serve to express its meaning [Du
sens, p. 42]

Here semantics as a science is the organization of the domain of

signification in such a way that the combination of the minmal
units of signification it isolates [Greimas's semes] will produce
on the plane of manifestation our common-sense experience
of language; its semiotic form will be a logical "metalanguage"
to express its meaning.
in chemistry this distinction is easy: the scientific forms
are the forms of combination of its elements [producing
chemical compounds as we experience them] which constitute
the new terminology of its semiotics in the form, say, of the
logic of the preiodic table. The periodic table in chemistry is
only immanent: it is the language- the logic--of the relations
between its elements. Even in phonology this distinction is
easy (and by using Jakobson's expression "distinctive
features," in the above passage, Greimas authorizes our
examining it): phonemes are the minimal elements in speech,
and phonology studies their combination; but phonemes
themselves exist in relation to one another by means of the
bundles of binary oppositions of their distinctive features
(Greimas calls these phemes), and while these features are never
manifest, they are always immanent and constitute elements in
the construction of the semiotic form of phonology.9 In
"Considerations sur le langage" Greimas paraphrases
Hjelmslev to define semiotics as "a hierarchy which can be
subject to analysis and whose elements can be determined by
reciprocal relations" (Du sens, p.22). He goes on to say: "looked
at more closely, the Hjelmslevian definition takes into account
the fact that any semiotics only exists implicitly, that it only
exists as a possibility of description" (pp. 22--23).
All of this, of course, is complicated by the science of
semantics whose object is the very meaning semiotics organizes
and articulates. Thus the distinction between semiotics and
semiology with which I began is further complicated in

9

Greimas's science of semantics: since language cannot be
abstracted from social functions the way chemistry can, the
semiotic form of semantics is semiology. As we shall see, the
semiological level is manifested in relation to the semantic
level, and together they transcend the logic of semiotics. In
Structural Semantics, the meaning of a text is not derived from
the meaning of lexical terms, as Culler suggests, it is not the
logical result of the combination of its minimal elements in the
way chemical elements follow the combinatory logic of the
periodic table. Rather, discursive meaning exists in a
relationship of reciprocal presupposition with its lexical items:
thus Greimas uses distributional analysis to "derive" the lexical
items and simultaneously uses those items to "derive" the
signification of Georges Bernano's corpus in Chapter XII.
That is, just as linguistics, as Greimas claims, is the
model for the human sciences (v.i.d), so semantics is the model
for linguistics. This explains Greimas's use, in Structural
Semantics, of Guiraud's "morpho-semantic study," which
structures phonemes into a semantics, and his actantial model,
which reduces syntax to semantics (VIII.2.g). In
"Considerations sur le langage" Greimas compares a
"cosmological semiotics" which describes natural objects (the
botanical classification developed in the seventh and
eighteenth centuries in his example) with an "antrhopological
semiotics" which describes a human object (a folk botanical
taxonomy described in Pierre Guiraud's Structures etymologiques).
"The only feature distinguishing the two kind of descriptions,"
Greimas writes,

seems to consist in the fact that cosmological semiotics

satisfies itself with a simple statement of what is, attentive to
the articulations of the objects which it analyzes, while
anthropological semiotics concentrates itself on the meaning
[sens] invested in the categories that make this articulation
possible. It is only in this way that we say that the
discriminations, the sources of differences, are "natural", whie
the meaning, apprehended by means of these differences, are
"human".
We can see, then, that the natural sciences are
comparable, in their procedures, to descriptions given to the
linguistic plane of expression where the phonological systems
can be constructed with the aid of a small nummber of
relevant features by virtue of their single discriminatory
character, while the human sciences correspond to
descriptions of the plane of content whose relevant features
are simultaneously distinctive and significant [significatifs]...
If custom, which is still not established, will permit it,
we can reserve the name semiotics only for the sciences of
expression, using the remaining available term, semiology, for
the disciplines of the content. ["Considerations sur le langage,"
Du sens, pp. 32-33]

Greimas is claiming, then, that science is itself a semiotics---a

language which, like all languages, is the coincidence of the
planes of expression and of content [see Du sens p. 21]---and
that the semiotics of semiotics is semantics, the science of
signification.
As we have seen, throughout Structural Sematics
Greimas distinguishes between the semiological level and the
semantic level. In the Dictionnaire raisonne under the entry "Niveau
[level]," Greimas says:
In semantics, considerations of the nature of the semes that
are constituents of the form of the content lead us to
distinguish in the signifying universe (the semiotic system
considered as paradigmatic of the content) between the
semiological level and the semantic level (in the narrow sense of the
term). The semiological level is constituted by minimal units
of expression, thus distinguishing the semantic level whose
units are abstract and necessary for the functioning and/or for
the construction of all semiotics.

Here Greimas's definitions exactly correspond to those he

uses for chemistry, and in Chapters IV and V of Structural
Semantics he attempts to define these minimal units. For hte
semiological level the minimal unit is what Greimas calls the
semic nucleus, the "permanent semic minimum" of a lexeme (a
word) which remains "invariant" in articulations (III. 5). For
the semantic level the minimum units are classemes, which are
semes that carry "the variations of 'meaning' which we have
previously observed can come only from the context" (IV.I.c)
which Greimas defines as "a unit of discourse superior to the
lexeme" (IV. 3.c). That is, the semiological level organizes and
articulates the external sensible world and provides language
with figures while the semantic level organizes and articulates
discourse itself by providing a small number of nonfiguratice
abstract categories (which Greimas speculates might be
"categories of the human mind" [VII.2.a]). Here it becomes clear
theat if, as Greimas uggests, the semiological level articulates
"the systematic level of language" (IV.2.c), then the semantic
level, whose minimal units are variants, is the analysis of elements
of the process of language. It is the semantic level that makes the
study of the discursive aspect of language possible and, as we
shall see, makes semantics a human science.
While Greimas goes to great lengths in Chapter V to
emphasize the mutual autonomy of these levels, it is important
to emphasize also how they are in a relationship of reciprocal
presupposition(see VII.2.a): as his definition notes, the
articulations of the semantic level "are abstract and necessary
for the functioning and/or for the construction of all
semiotics." Yet the invariants of the semiological level are
necessary for the description od semantics: it is no accident
that the description of the semiological level (Chapter V)
precedes that of the semiological level (Chapter VI). Returning
to a chemical metaphor, Greimas says:

The "piece of wax" of Descartes is no less mysterious than the

symbol of the moon. It is simply that the chemistry has
succeeded in giving an account of its elementary composition.
It is toward an analysis of the same type that structural
semantics must proceed. It is true the effects of meaning do
hold good in both cases [that is, both the "piece of wax" and
the moon create "symbolic" effects of meaning in their
articulation], but the new analytic plane of reality--whether it
is in chemistry or semiology--is not less legitimate.

This "relation of reciprocal presupposition" between system

and process brings us once again to the central importance of
Saussure to Structural Semantics: its whole structural aim is based
on Saussure's distinction between the realtion of reciprocal
presupposition between categories of langue and parole,
between the "system" and the "process" of language.
"Hjelmslev," Greimas has said, interpreted the opposition
between langue and parole as a general opposition, common
to all scientific approaches, between system and process, or, in
linguistics, between paradigmatic and syntagmatic."
("Interview," p. 57)
Finally, then, insofar as Structural Semantics systematizes
as well as describes this "general opposition, common to all
secientif approaches," as we have returned to the scientific
thrust of Greimas's semantics, what I will later call its
"axiology": as Herman Parret said in formulating a question
for Greimas in Discussing Language, the "great originality" of
Greimas "in this panorama of contemporary linguistics is to
have seen that structural semantics is a semiotics, the
semiotics" ("Interview", p. 79). It is the "science" of
articulating science. This is why, I suspect, that throughout
Structural Semantics, Greimas is so anxious to use figuratively
terms appropriated from the natural sciences: isotopy, homology,
algorithm, exteroceptive, interoceptive, proprioceptive, and others. It is
why, for instance, Greimas uses the term seme to parallel pheme:
there are, he says, "units of minimal signification )=semes)
corresponding to the distinctive features on the plane of
expression (=phemes)" ("La Structure semantique." Du sens,
p. 40). He does so to create a terminology of semantics that is
analogous to the terminology in phonology which isolates
physical (that is, nautral) phenomena. (This isolation, however,
is essentially structural: "This minimal unit, however, which we
have called seme, has no existence on its own and can be
imagined and described only in relation to something that it is
not, inasmuch as it is only part of a structure of signification"
[VII.1.b].)
Note: The terms exteroceptive, interoceptive, and
proprioceptive designate the capacity of an organism to
receive external stimuli (for instance, the sight of a predator),
internal stimuli (the sight of a predator in a dream), and reflexive
stimuli (the sight of its own leg). Greimas uses these terms to
designate the difference between the semiological level
(exteroceptive) and the semantic level (interoceptive), when they are
considered as morphemic structures [VII.i.d]. In the
Dictionnaire raisonne he adds (under interoceptivite):

exteroceptivity : interoceptivity : : semiological : semantic : : figurative : :

nonfigurative

Proprioceptivity, combining external and internal stimuli, is what

we shall see Greimas calls the "complex term," and he uses it
in relation to the systemic structures rather than the
morphemic structures.

For this reason, in Chapter V Greimas cites at length

Pierre Guiraud's "Etude du champ morpho-semantique de la
racine T.K." [Morpho-semantic study of the root T.K.] to
demonstrate that the semiological level is "an ensemble of
categories and semic systems situated and apprehensible at the level
of perception" (VII.2.c; italics added). Here he is attempting to
demonstrate a distinction crucial to structural analysis and its
scientific project:

Hjelmslev's concept of the form of the content [as opposed to

the "substance of the content"; see II.9], while being
revolutionary inasmuch as it signified the death of formalism,
cannot be used to establish the real distinction between the
levels of language, especially when one wants to maintain, as
we do, the Saussurean conception of language considered as a
form whose sole manifestation is the result of provoking the
appearance of effects of meaning assimilable to the substance of
the content. The line we have to draw is thus the one which
would separate the semiological from the semantic, and not
the form of the substance. [V.2.b]

This distinction repeats that of Levi-Strauss in his revision of

Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, "Structure and Form:
Reflections on the Work of Vladimir Propp" (a text basic to
Structural Semantics): "Form is defined by opposition to material
other than itself. But structure as no distinct content, it is
content itself, apprehended in a logical organization conceived
as a property of the real."10 This is "the death of formalism"
because it redefines "form" as a structure which is, not
separate from, but in a relation of reciprocal presupposition
with its "content." By making the semiological level
"apprehensible at the level of perception," Greimas is avoiding
a new formalism where the semantic level would be the form
and the semiological level would be what Levi-Strauss calls the
"arbitrary content," "absolutely separate" from the form (s...f,
p.131). This leads Greimas to say that semiological categories
seem to be "isomorphs of the qualities of the sensible world"
(V.2.c) and to go to great lengths to show ther are linguistic
and not natural (on the order of a "natural symbolism" of the
qualities of the sensible world) throughout Chapter V. The
distinction between the semiologivcal and semantic levels, he

10

maintains throughout Structural Semantics, is that between semic
invariants and variants, both "forms of the content."
Greimas's extensive citation of Guiraud's study does
not aim at overturning one of Saussure's basic postulates, the
arbitrary nature of the sign, but simply at demonstrating that
semic systems are perceivable. He cites him to offer a
structural reading of what Levi-Strauss calls "the vocabulary
stage":

It is currently accepted that language