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23167-0030a.GIF
Figure 2.1
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." 1
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.
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).
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.
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.
Thus one faces a drift phenomenon which is analogous to what hap-

 
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