How The Semiotic Square Came

In this paper, I intend to give a presentation of the diagram known in semiotics as “the semiotic square”. More precisely, I would like to retrace semiotic square’s origins and early history until its “official” presentation in a dictionary of semiotics. One would expect that the logical square should have taken a great part in the invention of the semiotic diagram. However, the trajectory of the semiotic square was more fluctuating and heterogeneous than what is expected a priori, coming under the influence not only of logic but also of other sources of knowledge, as anthropology and linguistics. Shaped at the very same moment by a diagrammatical representation the semiotic square allows an underdetermination of the relations of its objects. The object becomes properly structural simply when the square displayed that structure. So the determinations of the structure can be renewed by the way of theoretical discussion around the square itself, constructing and, soon, deconstructing, a concrete geometrical shape. And this is the usual way semioticians think.