This lecture aims to provide some relevant knowledge about the educational background of Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1922) with special reference to some of his major works devoted to the theory of langage meant as an analytical method for interpreting the sciences of man in terms of structural signification. The author of this lecture had the opportunity to take an intensive part in seminars at the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences conducted by Greimas in Paris. What is noticeable is that these seminars attracted many scholars from Europe and abroad. These seminars constituted not only his outlines of the idea of structural semantics, or his theory of sense, referring to more than the concept of meaning in contemporary understanding, but also his famous semiotic square of logical contradictions, used as a tool for the explanation of structural relationships between the signs of epistemological positions in language and culture sciences. Against the facts known from the curriculum vitae of Greimas, there are also less known facts, namely where the ideas of this founder father of French structuralism come from. These facts will be brought to the knowledge of the participants of the 2024 IASS-AIS congress, under the label Greimas that is unknown. The lecture is meant as a return to some epistemic encounters of Greimas with Lous Hjelmslev accompanied by Roland Barth in the end of 1940s at Alexandria. Moreover, it intends to point out that in the 1960s Greimas got in touch with some elements of symbolic logic of Hans Reichenbach thanks to the mediation of Nusret Hizir, a Turkish philosopher from Istanbul. Worth mentioning might be also Paul Ricoeur’s university meetings and public debates with Greimas, at the time when he showed interests in structuralism having in view to elaborate his theory of hermeneutics. Finally, younger adepts of semiotics would be interested in the cooperative encounters of Greimas with Joseph Courtés, which resulted in the edition of a worldwide known dictionary of semiotics, as the so-called reasoned dictionary of language theory, edited in French in 1966 and translated into English under the title of Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary in 1983. As such, the lecture expects to contribute to reducing the inaccuracies of interpretation, which sometimes restrain the influence of the Paris School of Semiotics on account of hasty translations and oversimplified evaluations that impede the reception of novel insights.

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