Greimas embodied: How kinesthetic opposition grounds the semiotic square

Abstract

According to Greimas, the semiotic square is far more than a heuristic for semantic and literary analysis. It represents the generative “deep structure” of human culture and cognition which “define the fundamental mode of existence of an individual or of a society, and subsequently the conditions of existence of semiotic objects”. The veracity of this bold hypothesis has received little attention in the literature. In response, this paper traces the history and development of the square of opposition from Aristotle to Greimas and beyond, to propose that the relations modeled in these diagrams are rooted in gestalt memories of kinesthesia and proprioception from which we derive basic structural awareness of opposition and contrast—including verticality, bilaterality, transversality, markedness and analogy. The paper draws on findings in the phenomenology of movement, recent developments in the analysis of logical opposition, recent scholarship in (post)Greimasian semiotics and prescient insights from Greimas himself. The argument is further tested via multimodal content analyses of a popular music video—highlighting relationships the semiotic square shares with mundane cultural ideologies and showing how these relationships might be traced to memory structures of bodily movement. The paper highlights the neglected relevance of embodied chiasmus and illustrates the enduring relevance of Greimasean thought.

Researching visual semiotics online

“…Greimas (1987). The weight of this possibility in turn would be augmented by the embodied relations of the four-limbed Yama who supports it; and this orientation might provide evidence for testing my hypothesis that the semiotic square is itself an embodied diagram (Pelkey, 2017a). With this hypothesis in mind, I began to wonder whether or not different tokens of this model were robustly consistent in terms of their internal organization between part-whole relations or, alternatively, whether they might be marked by substantial variation.…”

Performance of Language: A Comparative Linguistic Study of News About China and Italy During the COVID-19 Pandemic in a Canadian News Program

“…It is not to discourage questioning and investigation in stories from the marginalized communities; to the contrary, the project encourages fair criticism of all sources. Western imperial knowledge creates "psychological double-binds" (Pelkey, 2017), and misses opportunities that demand critical examination (Alatas, 2000;Pelkey, 2017). The project presents a diversity of stories that were excluded from the binary logic due to ideological difference and connects to the universal human experience in the pandemic.…”

“…In his study on the semiotic square, Pelkey suggested to engage in peaceful dialogue and obtain universal knowledge inquiry, it is important to abandon the double-bind approach in any ideological architecture that presuppose one member of the pair having privilege over the other unmarked member, in social or intellectual status (2017). The "oppositional tautology" (Pelkey, 2017) in the semiotic square can be used to illustrate The National's ideologically driven presentation of China and consideration for information in the middle-ground. The vacuum video space in the project is charged with power discourse and can be seen as spatial dimensions in the semiotic square with oppositional relationship of top/bottom and left/right.…”

“…The vacuum video space in the project is charged with power discourse and can be seen as spatial dimensions in the semiotic square with oppositional relationship of top/bottom and left/right. Visual metaphors are conditioned with human cognitive embodiment of space, such as up is happy and sad is down, left (sinitra/sin) is evil and right (giusto/correct) is good (Pelkey, 2017). The placement of the two juxtaposing videos presents the two countries' corpora, where China's is placed on the lower half, left side of the space and Italy's is placed on the upper right side.…”

Urban (Un)Sustainability: Cases of Vilnius’s Informal and Illegal Settings

“…The semiotic or Greimas square could be treated as a type of extended dichotomies. Scholars apply the semiotic square by analyzing human cognition [43], heuristic aspects of social existence [44], educational process [45], (anti)brand meanings [46] and even Western astrology [47]. Besides this, it has been used in literary criticism [48].…”