THE PLACE OF SYNCRETISM IN MULTICODES LANGUAGES

Abstract

The author of this study presents a brief two-part critical review of the concept of syncretism. In the first part, it is incorporated the formulations that had been more disseminated in the Semiotics field, especially the proposals of Greimas and Courtes in the first great dictionary of theory (1979) and the proposal of J. M. Flochs in the second dictionary (1986). In the second part, a summary is presented concerning the author’s hypotheses which were developed in his master's dissertation (1983). The objective is to put side by side the two critical parts of his text to make a revision and submit it to the reflection of those interested in the subject. The author believes that even today there is not either an adequate definition of the concept of syncretism or a precise place of its occurrence in the theoretical instances when it is required the description of multi-code languages. The extension of the concept of syncretism – from its field of origin in phonological linguistic and morphological and syntactic analysis (such as "neutralization") to the vast field of complex languages - although already foreshadowed in Hjelmlev’s propositions, requires a transposition of large-scale that is not yet considered in the developments that the concept has already achieved. The author endorses some urgent tasks proposed by Fiorin (2009) to overcome the pointed shortage and proposes others.