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the second sense acceptable. If the meaning of pig were ''gentle horselike white animal with a horn in its front," the word could not connote "filthy person."
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A can connote B because of a strongly established metonymic relationship (for instance, cause for effect) or because some semantic markers characterize both contents of two sign functions (and in this sense metaphors are a subspecies of connotation), but not because of a mere phonetic similarity between expressions. |
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Moreover, even when a connotation becomes culturally recorded (like pig for "filthy person"), the connotative use must always be legitimated by the context. In a Walt Disney context the three little pigs are neither filthy nor unpleasant. In other cases it is the very contextual strategy that posits a connotation: see the example of Proust's Recherche, in which (both as a thing and as a word) a madeleine connotes the remembrance of one's own past. But outside Proustian contexts (comprehending also cases of intertextual citation), a madeleine is simply a sort of cake, as well as in Heller's text (see above, section 1) a fish was simply a fish (while in the context of early Christian iconography a fish, both as a word and as an image, connotes Jesus Christ). |
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Instead, in cases of neoplastic growth, as it happens in the most extreme cases of Hermetic drift, no contextual stricture holds any longer: not only is the interpreter entitled to shift from association to association, but also in doing so every connection becomes acceptable. |
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The diagram below (figure 2.2) aims at suggesting an idea of neoplastic connotative growth where at a certain point a mere phonetic association (Expression to Expression) opens a new pseudo-connotative chain where the content of the new sign no longer depends on the content of the first one. |
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Thus one faces a drift phenomenon which is analogous to what hap- |
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