A. J. Greimas’s concept of actantial model and its application to the study of contemporary Thai poetry

Abstract

This article aims to study the concept of actantial model developed by  A. J. Greimas, a French linguist and semiotician, and to apply it to the analysis of contemporary Thai poetry. Greimas asserts that there are underlying structures in all narratives, which led him to develop the concept and approach known as the actantial model to uncover these structrures. The actantial model consists of six actants:  subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, and opponent. While this concept has been primarily used to analyze fiction,
this article argues that it can also be applied to the study of poetry.

The study reveals that the analysis of actants in Thai poetry includes three steps:  the first step is to paraphrase the poems into narratives; the second is to transform these narratives into narrative discourses; the third is to analyze their actants.

It should be noted that the actantial model is often used to analyze narratives where events and characters are inherent. Therefore, the application of this concept in analyzing poetry, especially in depicting thoughts and emotions, is limited. The paraphrasing and analyzing process should be accordingly conducted with accuracy and meticulousness. Furthermore, studying a large number of poems might make it possible to identify the narrative structures of certain group of Thai poetry, thereby revealing the collective ideas that dominate the content creation of Thai poetry.