Les statuts linguistique et sémiotique de l'actant

The concept of actant has enjoyed particular success in semiotics. From this concept was born the actantial schema, one of the important propositions of Greimasian semiotics. The actantial schema is first used in literary semiotics to examine the process of meaning of the story. It resulted in a so-called narrative semiotics. But, before semiotics became interested in the term, it had already been the subject of conceptualization in linguistics, by Lucien Tesnière. It is therefore from the latter that Greimas borrows the term “actant” to make it a major concept in semiotics. The project of this article is to retrace the career of the concept, relying on these two authors, considered the founding fathers.