Algirdas Greimas

Algirdas Julien Greimas (; born Algirdas Julius Greimas; 9 March 1917 – 27 February 1992) was a Lithuanian literary scientist who wrote most of his body of work in French while living in France. Greimas is known among other things for the Greimas square . He is, along with Roland Barthes, considered the most prominent of the French semioticians. With his training in structural linguistics, he added to the theory of signification, plastic semiotics, and laid the foundations for the Paris school of semiotics. Among Greimas's major contributions to semiotics are the concepts of isotopy, the actantial model, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world. He also researched Lithuanian mythology and Proto-Indo-European religion, and was influential in semiotic literary criticism.

Biography Greimas's father, Julius Greimas, 1882–1942, a teacher and later school inspector, was from Liudvinavas in the Suvalkija region of present-day Lithuania. His mother, Konstancija Greimienė, née Mickevičiūtė (Mickevičius), 1886–1956, a secretary, was from Kalvarija.

Nazi Germany's invading forces entered Šiauliai on 26 June 1941. The next day, Greimas met with other partisans and was put in charge of a platoon. He handed down an order from the German Commandant to round up 100 Jews to sweep the streets. He felt uncomfortable and did not return the next day. Nevertheless, he became an editor of the weekly , which urged ethnic cleansing of Jews from Lithuania. The nominal editor, Vladas Pauža, was a proponent of genocide. In 1942, in Kaunas, Greimas became active in the underground Lithuanian Freedom Fighters Union, which derived from the Lithuanian Nationalist Party, which the Nazis had banned in December 1941. He grew close to life long liberal-minded friends Bronys Raila, Stasys Žakevičius-Žymantas, and Jurgis Valiulis.

In 1944, he enrolled for graduate study at the Sorbonne in Paris and specialized in lexicography, namely taxonomies of exact, interrelated definitions. He wrote a thesis on the vocabulary of fashion (a topic later popularized by Roland Barthes), for which he received a PhD in 1949.

Greimas began his academic career as a teacher at a French Catholic boarding school for girls in Alexandria in Egypt,