Sémir Badir

Enjeux de la notion de genre en sémiotique

Abstract What is a genre? Applied to the textual domain, this question has received a descriptive answer in language studies. Genres would thus be distinguished from one another through formal (syntactic and lexical) traits and specific enunciative markers, as well as through the specificities of punctuation on the layout. Such response presupposes a global model where genres assemble texts (that actually undergo analysis) and are in turn integrated into discourse. I question this model in the name of empiricism: genres, as governed by usage, do not allow for such integration. Genres are heterogeneous by nature and their description cannot be rigid. The reason is that genres are a product of a certain type of interpretative practice of texts and, beyond texts, of all sorts of works. The aim of this study is to show how genre is the categorization that corresponds to a hermeneutics of appropriation and, in this sense, is reluctant to being disclosed through a formal description. Greimas seems never to have doubted this, since his semiotic project was precisely centered in the neutralization of generic categories.

Is the arbitrary symmetrical

Abstract Arbitrariness is commonly seen as a major concept in Saussure’s thought, and it even receives the status of a “principle” in his theory. It is not only the characteristic feature of the relation between the signifier and the signified (the semiological relation is arbitrary), but moreover it is constitutive of this very relation (the relation is semiological because it is arbitrary; there is a so-called “semiological relation” established between a signifier and a signified because of the principle of arbitrariness). And when linguists and other Saussurean interpreters comment on the concept of arbitrariness, they usually imply a binary relation: the semiological relation is arbitrary due to the fact that the signifier is arbitrarily chosen vis-à-vis the signified, and vice versa. I will be questioning the latter assertion in this paper. In my opinion, the symmetry of the semiological relation has not been properly demonstrated. The signifier can be seen as arbitrary with regard to the signified, but no reason has been provided to recognize the converse. Instead a number of arguments can be put forth to see arbitrariness as a concept that implies a non-symmetrical relation.