This is a school of structuralist semiotic thinking established by Algirdas Greimas (1917-1992), a Lithuanian by origin. Strongly influenced by Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1966), it seeks to identify basic structures of signification. Greimas focused primarily on the semantic analysis of textual structures but the Paris School has expanded its rigorous (critics say arid) structural analysis to cultural phenomena such as gestural language, legal discourse and social science.