From Greimas to J.-Cl. Coquet: The Discourse and its Subject

Abstract

Greimas’s “discursive semiotics” stipulated, from an anthropological point of view, that discourses are only the manifestations of “semiotic constraints” at play at the level of the “human mind”. On the basis of his semiotics, reexamined in a phenomenological perspective, a new approach to discourse was later on gradually constituted. It explores the modes of participation of the “subject of the enunciation” to his own sayings and doings and shows that discursive meaning is polyphonic and expresses the voice of the physis as well as that of the logos.