Welcome to a series of videos on the Greimas Square, also known as the semiotic square. In this first video I just want to give you a sense of the basic model what are the components of the square. And then in future videos we'll talk also about how to use it, what some of the limitations are, and so on. Now for this series I'm focusing on this classic article by Greimas and Rastier: "The interaction of semiotic constraints." This is where most people agree the Greimas Square was first really explained fully in a sense. It's the classic description, so that's what we'll focus on here. Okay, so let's start drawing a square, and we're going to start with a simple letter here. We'll call this S, and S in this case is going to start [stand] for the semantic universe. We can have any number of semantic universes, so it's not as if this is describing all of reality necessarily. It's describing one angle on reality, and the terms within this semantic universe have to add up to something. They create a closed system. We can even talk about a kind of ideological closure so that the terms have to ... cover the field of this semantic universe. So we're going to talk about smaller units of meaning then within the semantic universe, and the term for a smaller unit of meaning is a "seme." Think of a "seme" as something like a molecule or an atom. It's a small unit of meaning within this semantic universe. We'll have two semes here, and these are contrasting semes. So we have S1 and S2, and what you typically do with a Greimas Square is you start with a binary opposition -- two terms that are opposed. Part of the purpose of the Greimas Square is that once you have this binary opposition you can deepen it, you can open it up. And that's going to really help you study such things as myth, and folklore, and culture, and literature, and film, and all the rest of those fields. Now in this case we're going to start with the example of life and its opposite, death. Okay, that's our binary opposition and both of these are covered then in this larger semantic universe. There's some technical terms that Greimas uses for this. When he talks about this he refers to life and death as hyponyms. These are hyponyms, and to give an example of this let's say you talk about different birds. You could talk about crows and you could talk about pigeons, and the list goes on. We can link these back to a larger term -- in this case "birds." And in this case hyponyms are these kind of equal terms that fall under a larger category. So we would say that the hyponym is a term whose semantic field, whose field of meaning, is included in another word or another term. And this other term is called the hypernym. Alright, so some technical jargon there. It's not hugely important, but it gives you a sense of how life and death relate back to the larger semantic universe. We haven't finished our square yet. We've got two corners of it, but we need the other two corners. And to create those we're going to take the opposite of these two terms, or at least the contradiction of these two terms. So the opposite, the contradiction of death would be "not death." And we're going to call this S2 but we're going to put a line over the S to show that this is a negation. In fact this bottom part of the square can be designated as negative S. This is the negative side of the square. Then we're going to take S1 and draw it over here -- put a line over it as well. And we're going to call this "not life." You might say, well, this bottom side seems kind of useless. It's just the absence of something. But it actually does open things up considerably as we'll see. The next thing we can do is talk about the relationships between these terms, and in general the relationship here is "disjunctive." The other term that Greimas uses is "conjunctive," so when terms work together. In a sense they add up. They can be conjunctive. But here the relationships are disjunctive. They clash with each other. So the first relationship here (and we're going to draw a dotted line here) is between life and death. This relationship is what Greimas calls "contrary," and the same relationship is between the two bottom terms as well. These are called contraries. Then we have the diagonal relationship. We'll use a straight line for this (or a non-dotted line I suppose), and he calls this "contradictory." So when you draw a Greimas Square you're supposed to take the contrary and the contradictory. Those are the different disjunctive relationships that we have to be able to figure out. Now the neat thing is that if you have just one term (let's say S1: you have "life"), you should be able to draw the the three other corners of the Greimas Square, because you simply work through the contrary and the contradictory. That's our basic square. The next thing is that Greimas and Rastier assign some terms to these different relationships. First of all, at the very top we have what's called the complex axis, and at the bottom we have the neutral axis. When we talk about an axis we're talking about this horizontal relationship. The two diagonal lines are called schemas and the first one here (and I'll try write on an angle) this is schema one. So the second one is schema two! Again, we can talk about the two schemas and the interesting thing here is that they are contradictory to each other as well: so death and not death. Schema 2 contradicts Schema 1: life and not life. The last relationship is what's called deixis ("dayxis") or deixis ("day-ih-xis"), depending on where you live and how you pronounce this. So deixis 1 is on the left side, and it's a relationship between life and not-death. And then, as you can guess, deixis 2 is going to be over. That's deixis 2: between death and not-life. To describe this relationship Greimas uses the term "implication," and what he means by that is obviously that the one term implies the other. But I think a clear way to think about this is by using something like a Venn diagram. So if we take a circle and we put in it S2 (not-death) ... then the other concept (S1) exists within this. So life in this case is a smaller circle within the larger circle of not-death. And, in fact, S1 can be defined by the larger term. So we could say life (to be alive) is to be not dead. But it doesn't necessarily work the other way around, because life in a sense is a more specific, smaller concept. The same thing can be said for the other side. So, if we look over here, we would say that not- life is the larger concept and death is the smaller concept. That's pretty much it for the Greimas Square in terms of the basic model, but I'd like to end with one more example, for good measure, and a few final observations. In this example we have traffic lights -- particularly European traffic lights as we'll find out! We have a green light, which means go, obviously, and then the opposite would be a red light which means stop. Now, what I've indicated here is that these top rules they're they're all examples of injunctions. An injunction is kind of like a command. It's an order, it's something you get to do. And these are the positive rules of the system, whereas on the bottom we have non- injunctions. It's almost like an absence of rules. So there are two types of rules then. We can have prescriptions, which kind of say you should do this, you have to do this, you get to do this. And then interdictions -- these are things that are forbidden. They might even be taboo. Those are the two kinds of injunctions that we tend to find, and Greimas suggests that when we create these squares we place our prescriptions on the left and our interdictions on the right. That's important because eventually we're going to get to the stage where we start comparing multiple squares at the same time, and so we need to start creating some basic patterns and rules for how we put these squares together. If you look at the bottom, what's kind of fascinating here is that we have two orange lights, and this, as mentioned, is very much a European thing. The orange lights on the right side here: that's the one that we tend to be used to if we're in North America. That's the orange one that comes after a green light. And it kind of says watch out, there's a red light coming! So you can see it over here [the red light]. There's a red light coming: slow down! It's closer to an interdiction. It's time to start stopping here. By contrast, the orange one over here is one that comes after a red light, and it's kind of saying: there's a green light coming. It's almost time to get going again. Sso this one is closer to an injunction [prescription], but both of these are really in-between signs, and they're non interdictions, they're non prescriptions [or interdictions]. That's the last bit then, and in the next video we'll really start talking about how to compare, as mentioned, multiple squares, and how you can then use those to analyze particular texts or social and cultural phenomena. Hopefully as we dig into this in more detail you'll find that the Greimas Square can be very useful for your own field as well.