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found. Thus, to decide which presuppositions will survive in a given text, it will be necessary to consider various elements which can be contradictory: previous shared knowledge about the falsity of presuppositions, inconsistency with other background assumptions, entailments or conversational implicatures, and so on. Similar approaches can be found in Dinsmore (1981b) and, for a more formal, even if partial, version in Gazdar (1979). |
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2.1. The Encyclopedic Framework |
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The nature of p-terms must be described within the framework of a semiotic theory displaying the following characteristics (for previous theoretical foundations, see Eco 1976, 1979a, 1979b, 1984): |
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1. It establishes the possibility of the representation of the content of simple expressions (in a verbal language: lexical items) as a set of properties or semantic features. |
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2. These semantic features are not metalinguistic elements belonging to a finite set of semantic universals but interpretants (in Peirce's sense, that is, other expressions of the same or of another language); |
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3. These interpretants are given not only as atomic properties (such as human or object) but also in the format of instructions on how to insert the analyzed expression into contexts (contexts being coded classes of possible actual co-texts or textual environments). |
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4. These contextual selections should also take into account the felicity conditions for using the utterances of the expression in the course of acts of communication according to coded classes of extralinguistic circumstances or situations. |
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5. Such a representation, in terms of contextual and circumstantial instructions, cannot have the format of a dictionary but must have the format of an encyclopedia able to furnish elements of so-called world knowledge. |
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6. Such an encyclopedia is a working hypothesis, a semiotic postulate, never attainable in its complexity and globality, but the working hypothesis allows for the (always transitory) formulation of partial encyclopedic representations aiming at describing the kind of competence supposedly requested in order to interpret a given text or a class of texts. |
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