Early Greimas's first published essay ("
Cervantes and his Don Quixote") came out in the literary journal , which he helped to found, during the period of alternating
Nazi and Soviet occupations of Lithuania. Although a review of the first Lithuanian translation of
Don Quixote, it addressed partly the issue of one's resistance to circumstances – even when doomed, defiance can at least aim at the preservation of one's dignity ( ). The first work of direct significance to his subsequent research was his doctoral thesis . He left
lexicology soon after, acknowledging the limitations of the discipline in its concentration on the word as a unit and in its basic aim of classification, but he never ceased to maintain his lexicological convictions. He published three dictionaries throughout his career. During his decade in Alexandria, the discussions in his circle of friends helped broaden his interests. The topics included Greimas's early influences – the works of the founder of
structural linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure and his follower, Danish linguist
Louis Hjelmslev, the initiator of
comparative mythology Georges Dumézil, the
structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Russian specialist in fairy tales
Vladimir Propp, the researcher into the aesthetics of theater
Étienne Souriau, the
phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the
psychoanalyst Gaston Bachelard, and the novelist and art historian
André Malraux.
Discourse semiotics Greimas proposed an original method for
discourse semiotics that evolved over a thirty-year period. His starting point began with a profound dissatisfaction with the structural linguistics of the mid-century that studied only phonemes (minimal sound units of every language) and morphemes (grammatical units that occur in the combination of phonemes). These grammatical units could generate an infinite number of sentences, the sentence remaining the largest unit of analysis. Such a molecular model did not permit the analysis of units beyond the sentence. Greimas begins by positing the existence of a
semantic universe that he defined as the sum of all possible meanings that can be produced by the value systems of the entire culture of an ethno-linguistic community. As the semantic universe cannot possibly be conceived of in its entirety, Greimas was led to introduce the notion of
semantic micro-universe and
discourse universe, as actualized in written, spoken or iconic texts. To come to grips with the problem of signification or the production of meaning, Greimas had to transpose one level of language (the
text) into another level of language (the
metalanguage) and work out adequate techniques of
transposition. The descriptive procedures of
narratology and the notion of
narrativity are at the very base of Greimassian semiotics of discourse. His initial hypothesis is that meaning is only apprehensible if it is articulated or narrativized. Second, for him, narrative structures can be perceived in other systems not necessarily dependent upon natural languages. This leads him to posit the existence of two levels of analysis and representation: a
surface and a
deep level, which forms a common trunk where narrativity is situated and organized anterior to its manifestation. The signification of a phenomenon does not therefore depend on the mode of its manifestation, but since it originates at the deep level, it cuts through all forms of linguistic and non-linguistic manifestation. Greimas' semiotics, which is
generative and
transformational, goes through three phases of development. He begins by working out a
semiotics of action (), where
subjects are defined in terms of their quest for
objects, following a
canonical narrative schema, which is a formal framework made up of three successive sequences: a
mandate, an
action and an
evaluation. He then constructs a
narrative grammar and works out a syntax of
narrative programs in which subjects are
joined up with or
separated from objects of value. In the second phase, he works out a
cognitive semiotics (), where in order to perform, subjects must be
competent to do so. The subjects' competence is organized by means of a
modal grammar that accounts for their existence and performance. This modal semiotics opens the way to the final phase that studies how
passions modify actional and cognitive performance of subjects (), and how belief and knowledge modify the competence and performance of these very same subjects.
Mythology He later began researching and reconstructing
Lithuanian mythology. He based his work on the methods of
Vladimir Propp,
Georges Dumézil,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, and
Marcel Detienne. He published the results in (
Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology) 1979, and (
In Search of National Memory) 1990. He also wrote on
Proto-Indo-European religion. == Works translated in English ==