Subject collection: Semiotics (98 titles, 1967–2015)

There is little hope of reconstructing by means of comparative or typological studies a lingua adamica essentially different from present-day languages. The distant preverbal past is however still present in live speech. Phonetic, syntactic and semantic rule transgressions, far from being products of a deficient output, are governed by a universal iconic apparatus, a sort of ‘anti-grammar’ or ‘proto-grammar’ which enables the speaker and the poet to express preconscious and subconscious mental contents that could not be conveyed by means of the grammar of any language. Secondary messages, generated by the proto-grammar are integrated into the primary grammatical message. The two messages whose structural and semantic divergence represents a chronological distance of hundreds of thousands of years, constitute a dialectic unity which characterize natural languages. The evolutive approach offers a different, perhaps better understanding of questions related to dynamic synchrony, vocal and verbal style, poetic language, language change.Chapters on: Diversity of the lexicon; Dual encoding: vocal style; Syntactic gesturing; Syntactic regressions; Prosodic expression of emotions; Poetry and vocal art; Situation and meaning; A hidden presence: verbal magic; Playing with language: joke and metaphor; Metaphor: a research instrument; Dynamics of poetic language; Semantic structure of possessive constructions; Semantic structure of punctuation marks; Why gestures?; Between acts and words; Language within language: dynamics, change and evolution.

Following Peirce in his non-reductive understanding of the theory of signs as a branch of aesthetics, this book reconceptualizes the processes of literary creation, appreciation and reading in semiotic terms. Here is a carefully developed theory of what sort of criteria serve to distinguish apposite from inapposite readings of literary works-of-art. Given Peirce's triadic account of signification, it enlarges Aristotle's view of mimesis as expressive making into an understanding of literary works as deliberatively designed sign-systems belonging to Peirce's eighth class of signs. In parallel with Bakhtin's account of the dialogical nature of literary work (and its success in exposing misreadings of Dostoyevsky), this work categorizes in precise theoretical terms what is wrong with the non-dialogical readings which treat Plato's dialogues as doctrinal tractates. As a study in literary theory finally, and on the basis of apt distinctions between exhibitive, active, and assertive judgments, this book re-demarcates and distinguishes the discipline of literary criticism from that of literary theory, and both of these from the work of literary creation itself.

If you read or reread Freud, it is difficult not to find on a single page references to language: from speech to text, from slip of the tongue to word play, from letter to meaning-passing inevitably through the strange notion of literal meaning, that fascinated Freud. In short, the unconscious is linked to language. How could it be otherwise, if psychoanalysis is a cure through speech as indicated as early as 1881, by Fraülein Anna O.? The problem of the relationship between linguistic and psychoanalytic concepts necessarily arises. Until now this question has been examined mainly by psychoanalysts, from their own perspective, but here it is investigated by a linguist, who systematically explores two domains. The first is related to the sign and symbol, where the meeting of Freud, Saussure and Hjelmselv ocurred; whereas in the second, that of the signifier, Saussure reappears escorted by Lacan. But Freud is not far away, sine the Lacanian theory of the signifier is rooted not only in Saussure's Cours, but also in the Metapsychology and in Freud's Correspondence with Fliess. To aspire to unravel this knot, in fact corresponds to attempt a reading of the Lacanian aphorism “the unconscious is structured like a language”.

The traditional gulf between the theory and practice of literature and the various areas subjoined under anthropology has hindered the development of some very fruitful perspectives in the realm of poetics and the general theory of literature (particularly in its narrative forms). Poyatos' initial idea of literary anthropology as the study of people and their cultural manifestations through their national literatures - without doubt the richest source of documentation of human life-styles and the most advanced form of our projection in time and space and of communicating with contemporary and future generations - has been enriched by the thoughts of a multi-cultural group of scholars from both anthropology and literature who at a first symposium on the subject attempted to define this area leaving the way open to many more research possibilities.

La sémiotique a-t-elle quelque chose à dire sure la littérature en tant que sœur des ‘beaux-arts’? Peut-elle rendre compte des raisons d’une réussite d’écriture? – Intention naïve, dira-t-on, que de vouloir décourvrir, sure la base des seules méthodes structurales, pourquoi une œuvre nous captive. Si le problème, et son enjeu, sont immenses (car il y va de la constitution d’une esthétique structurale), le terrain choisi pour l’aborder est, lui, partiellement défriché: l’écriture dite ‘réaliste’ relève d’une poétique dotée de ses méchanismes propres. A la suite notamment de A.J. Greimas, de H. Mitterand et de Ph. Hamon, D. Bertrand en reprend ici l’ analyse et en approfondit la portée grâce à une exploration systématique des figures de la spatialité dans le Germinal de Zola. Transcendant les distinctions entre figurativité et abstraction, un imaginaire topologique régit les divers niveaux de signification du roman et en garandit l’efficacité symbolique.