Considerations about the double tensive and rhetorical conditioning of the elementary meaning structures

Abstract

With reference to the model of the "generative process of meaning" (A. J. Greimas), this article tackles, in the first place, the possibility of reinterpreting its so-called "elementary structures" not only in terms of a "logical" inspiration, following the Aristotelian tradition, nor in terms of a "phonological" inspiration, supported by the works of the Prague Linguistic Circle, but in a way of radicalizing the Danish linguists' intuitions in a topologizing direction which (i) grants to the confronted terms the deformability that they lack in the previous interpretations, and (ii) giving epistemological primacy to the complex, leads to rethinking the values as positions in a flow, having "smaller" or "larger" intervals separating them. Such infra-categorial ciphers of "less" and "more" are taken, finally, as an invitation to bring together rhetoric and semiotics, since tropological rhetoric, which has always worked on the dimension of discourse and has always been interested in the intensifications of its effects, can shed light on this theoretical point.