Welcome to a series of videos on the Greimas Square, also known as the
semiotic square. In this first video I just want to give you a sense of the
basic model what are the components of the square. And then in future videos
we'll talk also about how to use it, what some of the limitations are, and so on.
Now for this series I'm focusing on this classic article by Greimas and Rastier:
"The interaction of semiotic constraints." This is where most people agree the
Greimas Square was first really explained fully in a sense. It's the
classic description, so that's what we'll focus on here. Okay, so let's start
drawing a square, and we're going to start with a simple letter here. We'll call
this S, and S in this case is going to start [stand] for the semantic universe.
We can have any number of semantic universes, so it's not as if
this is describing all of reality necessarily. It's describing one
angle on reality, and the terms within this semantic universe have to add up to
something. They create a closed system. We can even talk about a kind of
ideological closure so that the terms have to ... cover the field of
this semantic universe. So we're going to talk about smaller units of meaning then
within the semantic universe, and the term for a smaller unit of meaning is a
"seme." Think of a "seme" as something like a molecule or an atom.
It's a small unit of meaning within this semantic universe. We'll have two
semes here, and these are contrasting semes. So we have S1 and S2, and what
you typically do with a Greimas Square is you start with a binary opposition --
two terms that are opposed. Part of the
purpose of the Greimas Square is that once you have this binary opposition you
can deepen it, you can open it up. And that's going to really help you study such
things as myth, and folklore, and culture, and literature, and film, and all the rest
of those fields. Now in this case we're going to start with the example of life
and its opposite, death. Okay, that's our binary opposition and both of these are
covered then in this larger semantic universe. There's some technical terms
that Greimas uses for this. When he talks about this he refers to life and
death as hyponyms. These are hyponyms, and to give an example of this
let's say you talk about different birds. You could talk about crows and you could
talk about pigeons, and the list goes on. We can link these back to a larger term --
in this case "birds." And in this case hyponyms
are these kind of equal terms that fall under a larger
category. So we would say that the hyponym is a term whose semantic field,
whose field of meaning, is included in another word or another term. And this
other term is called the hypernym. Alright, so some technical jargon there.
It's not hugely important, but it gives you a sense of how life and death relate
back to the larger semantic universe. We haven't finished our square yet. We've
got two corners of it, but we need the other two corners. And to create those
we're going to take the opposite of these two terms, or at least the
contradiction of these two terms. So the opposite, the contradiction
of death would be "not death." And we're going to call this S2
but we're going to put a line over the S to show that this is a negation. In
fact this bottom part of the square can be designated as negative S. This is the
negative side of the square. Then we're going to take
S1 and draw it over here -- put a line over it as well. And we're going to call this "not
life." You might say, well, this bottom side seems kind of useless. It's just
the absence of something. But it actually does open things up considerably as
we'll see. The next thing we can do is talk about the relationships between
these terms, and in general the relationship here is "disjunctive."
The other term that Greimas uses is "conjunctive," so when terms work together.
In a sense they add up. They can be conjunctive. But here the relationships
are disjunctive. They clash with each other. So the first relationship here (and
we're going to draw a dotted line here) is between life and death. This
relationship is what Greimas calls "contrary," and the same
relationship is between the two bottom terms as well. These are called
contraries. Then we have the diagonal relationship.
We'll use a straight line for this (or a non-dotted line I suppose), and he calls
this "contradictory." So when you draw a Greimas Square you're supposed to take
the contrary and the contradictory. Those are the different disjunctive
relationships that we have to be able to figure out. Now the neat thing is that if
you have just one term (let's say S1: you have "life"), you should be able to draw the
the three other corners of the Greimas Square, because you simply work through
the contrary and the contradictory. That's our basic square. The next
thing is that Greimas and Rastier assign some terms to these
different relationships. First of all, at the very top we have what's called
the complex axis, and at the bottom we have
the neutral axis. When we talk about an axis we're talking about this
horizontal relationship. The two diagonal lines are called schemas and the
first one here (and I'll try write on an angle)
this is schema one. So the second one is schema two! Again, we can talk
about the two schemas and the interesting thing here is that they are
contradictory to each other as well: so
death and not death. Schema 2 contradicts Schema 1: life and not life. The last
relationship is what's called deixis ("dayxis") or deixis ("day-ih-xis"), depending on where you live
and how you pronounce this. So deixis 1 is on the left side, and it's a
relationship between life and not-death. And then, as you can guess, deixis 2
is going to be over. That's deixis 2: between death and not-life.
To describe this relationship Greimas uses the term "implication,"
and what he means by that is obviously that the one term implies the other. But
I think a clear way to think about this is by using something like a Venn
diagram. So if we take a circle and we put in it S2 (not-death) ...
then the other concept (S1) exists within this. So life in this case
is a smaller circle within the larger circle of not-death. And, in fact, S1
can be defined by the larger term. So we could say life (to be alive) is to be
not dead. But it doesn't necessarily work the other way around,
because life in a sense is a more specific, smaller concept. The same thing
can be said for the other side. So, if we look over here, we would say that not-
life is the larger concept and death is the smaller concept. That's
pretty much it for the Greimas Square in terms of the basic model, but I'd like to
end with one more example, for good measure, and a few final observations.
In this example we have traffic lights -- particularly European traffic lights as
we'll find out! We have a green light, which means go, obviously, and then the
opposite would be a red light which means stop. Now,
what I've indicated here is that these top rules they're they're all examples
of injunctions. An injunction is kind of like a command. It's an order,
it's something you get to do. And these are the positive rules of the system,
whereas on the bottom we have non- injunctions. It's almost like an absence
of rules. So there are two types of rules then. We can have prescriptions, which
kind of say you should do this, you have to do this, you get to do this. And then
interdictions -- these are things that are forbidden. They might even be
taboo. Those are the two kinds of injunctions that we tend to find, and
Greimas suggests that when we create these squares we place our prescriptions
on the left and our interdictions on the right. That's important because
eventually we're going to get to the stage where we start comparing multiple
squares at the same time, and so we need to start creating some basic patterns
and rules for how we put these squares together. If you look at the bottom,
what's kind of fascinating here is that we have two orange lights, and this, as
mentioned, is very much a European thing. The orange lights on the right
side here: that's the one that we tend to be used to if we're in North
America. That's the orange one that comes after a green light. And it kind of says
watch out, there's a red light coming! So you can see it over here [the red light].
There's a red light coming: slow down! It's closer to an interdiction. It's time
to start stopping here. By contrast, the orange one over here
is one that comes after a red light, and it's kind of saying: there's a green
light coming. It's almost time to get going again. Sso this one is closer to an
injunction [prescription], but both of these are really in-between signs, and they're non
interdictions, they're non prescriptions [or interdictions]. That's the last bit then, and in the
next video we'll really start talking about how to compare, as mentioned,
multiple squares, and how you can then use those to analyze particular texts or
social and cultural phenomena. Hopefully as we dig into this in more
detail you'll find that the Greimas Square can be very useful for
your own field as well.