Some Semiotic Reflections on the Temporality of News and History

Abstract

After discussing the difficulties that historically semiotics has often shown in considering time, the paper proposes a typology of temporal organization in narrative texts, distinguishing between a diegetic time (of the possible world), a temporal form characteristic of narrativity and an enunciational time, which is the result of the intersection between the first two. The specific temporalities of "artificial" or fictional, and "natural" narratives are then discussed. Among these, journalism is characterized by the particular opening of chronicles that take place simultaneously with the development of the facts.