Parallelisms and Inversions: The Unthought of the Semiotician

Abstract

The emphasis on the search for a method identifies Semiotics among human sciences. One of the guiding principles of this search is poeticness, conceived as a core mechanism of meaning-making structures. As Jakobson, Lévis-Strauss and, finally, with its exemplar analysis of Maupassant, Greimas illustrate, looking for parallelisms and inversions between expression and content is one of the most marking traits of Semiotic methodology. In order to clarify this point, the article resumes a previous semiotic analysis of Paolo Conte’s song Pittori della domenica, a text with manifest poetic features. The objective is not to articulate further what previously found, but to illuminate the underlying choices and questions that guided the path of the analyst, giving a voice to an otherwise tacit know-how.