Akshit posted an Question
August 07, 2020 • 05:42 am 30 points
  • UGC NET
  • English

Do provide general information about gremias structural semantics: an attempt at a method.

do provide general information about gremias Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method.

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    Deb dulal halder Halder Best Answer

    From that, a structural analysis of a sentence or a text will be the creation of a meta-linguistic model; said model is what is called a structure. This definition of structure is very interesting, as it is a pain point in structuralism to know just what structures are and where they are. Lévy-Strauss famously put them into the head of people; Greimas says they're simply scientific models, which gives them a lot more flexibility and avoids spurious psychological assumptions. Greimas is also very concerned with adding a dynamic aspect to structures, and since they're merely models, it feels almost completely natural to do so. He starts by extracting a very general model of how stories work, called the actantial model, and uses it, in combination with his method, to re-read Propp's theory of folktales and simplify it down to the expression of a broken contract between the hero and other actors, that is repaired or remade anew by the actions of the hero (to summarize very roughly). To mend together the level of structures and the level of actual words in a sentence, he defines a concept with lasting influence, that of isotopy, that is, the repetition of classemes throughout a text. This is an incredibly powerful concept that gives consistency to and allows precise analysis of how we feel a text is about something and has one or more themes. With this tool, even obscure symbolism can become crystal clear. Most of the book, if written in a highly abstract and concise style, is actually very didactic and careful. The last two chapters — about which the author warns are more like drafts — are much harder to read, and the overuse of letters to represent words that sometimes aren't even made explicit is mostly to blame.

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    Deb dulal halder Halder best-answer

    This book establishes the basis of a theory of linguistic semantics. The author is very clear with the scope of such a theory: analyzing some aspects of meaning at the level of language as a socio-cultural phenomenon, and not as psychological phenomenon (like in cognitive semantics) nor as a metaphysical relationship between the constituents of signs (like in Pierce's theory). In fact, his focus is on classemes, that is, units of meaning that relate other semantic units together into hierarchies of categories. This allows his method of analyzing meaning to proceed partly from intuition, by relying on the analyst's knowledge of a language and its cultural background

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