Formalizing Narrative Structures: Glossematics, Generativity, and Transformational Rules

Abstract

According to the author, Hjelmslev’s Glossematics is not adequate to base Greimas’s narrative structures for several reasons. First, Glossematics could be effectively encoded as a Turing Machine. Unfotunately, it would be generative only in a weak sense: it could generate every sort of narrative structure, not their structural description. A comparison with Propp’s model underlines another lack of Glossematics: it is not recursive. For these reasons, it cannot generate the infinite hierarchical self-embedded structures which represent the relation between base-narrative programs and use-narrative programs. The author shows a sketch of a formal grammar generating all, and only the narrative structures represented through Greimas’s metalanguage. Finally, after a critical balance on this generative model, its goals and its lacks, the author expresses his sympathy for a morphodynamic framework.

Keywords

• meta-language
• narrativity
• morphogenesis