Semiotics in France
pp. 153-175
in: Thomas Sebeok, Jean Umiker-Sebeok (eds), The semiotic sphere, Berlin, Springer, 1986Abstract
French semiotics came into being in the 1960s, following a new reading of the works of Louis Hjelmslev and helped notably by the publication in BSL (1946)1 of a deepened presentation of Hjelmslev's Prolegomena to a Theory of Language by A. Martinet which was quickly followed by an English translation of the book. Thus the origin of French semiotics is to be found in the researches of French structuralism, which for its part can be understood as the development of all that had been achieved in the linguistics schools of Prague and Copenhagen, reaching into new fields such as comparative mythology (G. Dumézil), anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan) and literature (Roland Barthes).
