A contribution from Greimasian Semiotics to the study of textual genre

Abstract

As official documents recommend the teaching of languages based on the theory of enunciation and the theory of genre, it is crucial to go forward on practical and applied issues that may contribute to the widening of the theoretical and practical tools available to the teacher in his/her didactic work with the text itself and its relation to the context in which it takes place. Concerning the semiotic theory, it is of major importance to provide answers to the issue of how to describe and explain texts, emphasizing that, in current society, texts in the media, which may be in newspapers, magazines, publicity, television, internet, or multimedia, besides texts on pictures, drawings, and plastic arts, have become a compulsory device in educational contexts. The Semiotic theory has been concerned with education, particularly in order to intervene in its relation with non-verbal texts, aiming at the formation of a reflexive reader who may criticize images as an integrating part of meaning. The semiotic reading aims at teaching the reader to 'read as he sees' the text, not aiming primarily at grasping the linguistic or grammatical aspects of the traditional reading, because that is the only way in which what is said and what is not said may be grasped from the text. Our presentation is divided into five parts: a) the presentation of theoretical reference; b) comments on cigarette packages as a textual gender; c) the production context; d) the language action situation; e) imagetic and verbal figurativizations.