Algirdas Julien Greimas
| Algirdas Julien Greimas | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Algirdas Julius Greimas 9 March 1917 Tula, Russian Empire |
| Died | 27 February 1992 (aged 74) Paris, France |
| Citizenship | Lithuania, France |
| Fields | Semiotics, linguistics |
| Alma mater | Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas; University of Grenoble; Sorbonne, Paris (PhD, 1949) |
| Known for | Greimas Square ("Greimas Square") |
| Influences | Georges Dumézil, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss |
| Influenced | Jacques Fontanille, Eric de Kuyper, Bruno Latour, Rastko Močnik, Rolandas Pavilionis |
| Spouse | Teresa Mary Keane |
Algirdas Julien Greimas (French: [alɡiʁdas ʒyljɛ̃ gʁɛmas]; born Algirdas Julius Greimas; 9 March 1917 – 27 February 1992), was a French-Lithuanian literary scientist, known among other things for the Greimas Square (le carré sémiotique). He is, along with Roland Barthes, considered the most prominent of the French semioticians. With his training in structural linguistics, he added to the theory of signification and laid the foundations for the Parisian school of semiotics. Among Greimas's major contributions to semiotics are the concepts of isotopy, the actantial model, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world. He also researched Lithuanian mythology and Proto-Indo-European religion, and was influential in semiotic literary criticism.
Greimas's father, Julius Greimas, 1882-1942, a teacher and later school inspector, was from Liudvinavas in the Suvalkija region of present-day Lithuania. His mother Konstancija Greimienė, née Mickevičiūtė (Mickevičius), 1886-1956, a secretary, was from Kalvarija. They lived in Tula, Russia, when he was born, where they ran away as refugees during World War I. They returned with him to Lithuania when he was two years old. His baptismal names are "Algirdas Julius" but he used the French version of his middle name, Julien, while he lived abroad. He did not speak another language than Lithuanian until preparatory middle school, where he started with German and then French, which opened the door for his early philosophical readings in high school of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. After attending schools in several towns, as his family moved, and finishing Rygiškių Jonas High School in Marijampolė in 1934, he studied law at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, and then drifted toward linguistics at the University of Grenoble, from which he graduated in 1939 with a paper on Franco-Provençal dialects. He hoped to focus next on early medieval linguistics (substrate toponyms in the Alps), but the beginning of World War II returned him to Lithuania for military service, where he then taught, worked as an editor, and published literary reviews and essays on culture.
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