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The following section will outline the semiotic requirements for an encyclopedia-like representation which establishes the specific properties of coded presuppositions for p-terms. |
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2.3. An Encyclopedic Representation of P-Terms |
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An encyclopedic representation of p-terms must |
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(a) take into account the coded felicity conditions of the lexical items; |
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(b) represent a set of instructions for the textual insertion of the lexical item; |
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(c) in doing so must consistently predict the result of the negation test. |
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Such a semantic representation must represent the presuppositional power of a lexical item by specifying some presupposed elements so that the part of a text where the p-term occurs can actualize them, exploiting their potential positional power. |
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The encyclopedic description is an abstract template which must be filled with specific meanings in co-textual situations. However, the interpretation is not arbitrary but is limited by the semantic model. The rhetorical strategies connected with the use of p-terms are predictable on the basis of its semantic representation. Our representation puts the presupposed semantic features within square brackets. What is represented within square brackets should survive the negation test. |
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The description of both presupposition and asserted or foreground meaning takes into account the difference between the actual world (the world presupposed by S and A as the world of their actual experiences) and possible worlds (as epistemic and doxastic worlds, conceivable but not actual states of affairs). Within a given world, different temporal states are considered. The representations consider cases in which a subject, S, wants, hopes, plans, and actually does some O (object): |
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S = a subject operator which can take the forms S1, S2, . . . Sn, these Ss being different Actants but not necessarily different Actors. For example, S1 SAY S2 means either ''x tells y" or "x tells himself." |
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WANT, DO, AWARE, etc., = predicates used as primitives. (It ought to be clear that in an encyclopedic representation based on interpretants there are no primitives, every interpretant being in its own turn interpretable; however, these primitives will be used as |
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