Documentary functions: the uses of documents in non-fictional texts

Abstract

Among the phenomena that define the spirit of our times, there is a growing tendency towards the registration and storage of data. Included within this phenomenon that some theorists call documentary inflation, the current spotlight on non-fictional narratives gives intelligibility to data and documents.

Using some examples taken from documentary cinema as its basis, this article proposes a typology of the uses (or functions) of documents. Four different documentary functions are defined and articulated starting from the logical opposition between syntagmatic and paradigmatic: narrative, referential, systemic and revealing.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

[1] Schliemann expressed it thus: ‘Accepting the information in the Iliad, in whose exactitude I believed as in the Gospel, I was convinced that Hissarlik, the mountain that I had excavated for three years, was the Pergamo of the city, that Troy had fifty thousand inhabitants and that its foundations covered the foundations of the Greek colony of Ilion’ (2006, 116–117).

[2] In generative semiotics (Greimas and Courtés 1982; Greimas 1987), the semiotic square represents the most fundamental level of significance and it is defined by Greimas and Courtés (1982, 305) as ‘the visual representation of the logical articulation of any semantic category.’ From the fundamental procedures of affirmation and negation, a semantic category is expanded into four different positions, articulated through three relationships: contrariety, contradiction and complementarity. With the category selected for our work, the contrariety relationship is seen in the opposition of syntagmatic/paradigmatic and non-paradigmatic/non-syntagmatic, where the last ones are defined as sub-contraries. The contradiction relationship is obtained through the act of negation and is represented in the pairs of syntagmatic/non-syntagmatic and paradigmatic/non-paradigmatic. The complementarity relationship is obtained through the act of affirmation and, in our category, it’s found in the relationships between the terms non-paradigmatic/syntagmatic and non-syntagmatic/paradigmatic. This last relationship makes up what are known as the two deixis; in this, non-paradigmatic and non-syntagmatic imply syntagmatic and paradigmatic, respectively, while, vice versa, syntagmatic and paradigmatic presuppose non-paradigmatic and non-syntagmatic, respectively.

[3] The entry ‘actant’ in the dictionary of semiotics by Greimas and Courtés 1982, 5) reads as follows: ‘The term “actant” is linked with a particular conception of the syntax which interrelates the functions of the elementary utterance. These functions, such as subject, object, predicate, are defined independently of their realisation in syntagmatic units (for example, nominal and verbal syntagms). This syntax also poses the predicate as the nucleus of the utterance. All this is to say that the actants are to be considered as the resultant terms of the relation known as the function’.

[4] In the narrative grammar of Greimas, the object of value is what the subject wants to or must attain and, therefore, it is really the propulsive force of the narration.

[5] Thus, it is observed that this type of use elicits effects on the enunciative level, reinforcing the fiduciary contract.

[6] As Jack Goody observes, the register of data frequently takes the form of ‘decontextualized observations’ and, therefore, of greater abstraction, since the use of an adequate metalinguistic terminology or, in other words, a meta description is required (1977, 108).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the I+D Project “El periodista como historiador del presente. Análisis de los documento en las nuevas formas de la información” [Reference code: CSO-2014-55527-P], granted by Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.

Notes on contributors

Rayco González

Rayco González, PhD, teaches at the University of Burgos. His main works focus on semiotics and cultural semiotics. Among other subjects, he has written about documentary comics, TV series, political communication and suspicion. Email: [email protected]

Marcello Serra, PhD, teaches at the Carlos III University of Madrid and his main interests are semiotics and media theory. Among other subjects, he has written about comics, popular culture, political communication and transparency. Email: [email protected]