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states of affairs which are described in terms of the same language as their narrative object. However (as proposed in Eco 1979), these descriptions can be analogically translated into world-matrices that, without permitting any calculus, provide the possibility of comparing different states of affairs under a certain description and making clear whether they can be mutually accessible or not and in which way they differ. Dolezel
* (1988:228ff) has persuasively demonstrated that a theory of fictional objects can become more fruitful if it abandons a oneworld model in order to adopt a possible worlds frame. |
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Thus, even though a theory of fiction will not emerge from a mechanical appropriation of the conceptual system of a Possible Worlds Semantics, such a theory has some right to exist. Let us say that the notion of possible world in a theory of fiction must concern furnished worlds in terms of the following features: |
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A fictional possible world is a series of linguistic descriptions that readers are supposed to interpret as referring to a possible state of affairs where if p is true then non-p is false (such a requirement being flexible since there also are, as we shall see, impossible possible worlds). |
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This state of affairs is made up of individuals endowed with properties. |
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These properties are ruled by certain laws, so that certain properties can be mutually contradictory and a given property x can entail the property y. |
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Since individuals can have the property of doing so, they undergo changes, lose or acquire new properties (in this sense a possible world is also a course of events and can be described as a temporally ordered succession of states). |
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Possible worlds can be viewed either as "real" states of affairs (see, for instance, the realistic approach in Lewis 1980) or as cultural constructs, matter of stipulation or semiotic products. I shall follow the second hypothesis, according to the perspective outlined in Eco 1979. Being a cultural construct, a possible world cannot be identified with the Linear Text Manifestation that describes it. The text describing such a state or course of events is a linguistic strategy which is supposed to trigger an interpretation on the part of the Model Reader. This interpretation (however expressed) represents the possible world outlined in the course of the cooperative interaction between the text and the Model Reader. |
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