Didactic semiotics: a conceptual and historical overview of an analytical practice

Abstract

Within the framework of discursive semiotics developed by A. J. Greimas and his collaborators, the so-called didactic semiotics was born in the late 1970s, along with other theoretical propositions conveyed in the Bulletin of the magazine Actes Semiotiques. The founding text of didactic semiotics, written by A. J. Greimas and entitled “Pour une sémiotique didactique” (Actes Semiotiques - Bulletin, II, 7, 1979), invited semioticians to conceive the didactic text and its discourse in terms of programming and persuasion. The programming would deal with the selection of contents and the discursivization and textualization of the didactic utterances, while the persuasion would deal with the relations between the enunciator and the didactic utterance. In this paper, we propose a historical and conceptual study on the constitution of didactic semiotics, understood not as completely identifiable and clearly recognizable disciplinary field of semiotics, but as a set of theoretical and analysis texts that allow us to clarify concerns that underlie a practice of analysis oriented to the competentialization of learning subjects, through the choice of certain corpora and research problems, as well as particular ways of segmenting and analyzing texts. In the articles and books that compose the analyzed corpus, which covers the period from 1970 to 1990, known as the key period of discursive semiotics formation in its opening to the most different types of objects, we find traces of a practice of analysis that presupposes a semiotic analysis focused essentially on the modal competence of the enunciatee as a subject that should be sensitized and guided by the didactic narrative. This approach to didactic discourse implies the choice of a strategic point of view, centered on persuasion and irreducible asymmetry of enunciative positions, which places didactic semiotics as a particular form of manipulative semiotics, alongside the semiotics of advertising and political discourses.