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the referent is. Such a scale should take into account elements such as A's ability to identify the referent unambiguously; the newness of the referent; the possibility of integrating it with the schematic knowledge of participants and with the schema already activated in the discourse; the degree of interference with other possible referents; and so on. Clearly enough, the choiceand, for A, the interpretationof an expression is a matter of pragmatic gradations and of probabilistic and inferential judgments. |
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In summary, definite descriptions and proper names have the function of providing A with elements necessary for identification of a given object. This identification process is distinct from the presupposition of existence, which depends on pragmatic phenomena of cooperation. The act of reference, and the subsequent identification, can present different levels of success and acceptability, depending on different contests and on different levels of shared knowledge between S and A. Generally speaking, the level of appropriateness of the definite description is directly connected to the possibility of the Addressee's activating a mental schema in which reference can be secured. |
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4. Cotextual Presuppositions |
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In text-understanding processes we can find a much wider range of presuppositional phenomena than we have analyzed so far. They cannot simply be reduced to the signification system coded in the encyclopedia, nor to definite descriptions or proper names. From this point of view, every text is a complex inferential mechanism (Eco 1979a) which has to be actualized in its implicit content by the reader. In order to make sense of a text, that is, to understand it, the reader has to "fill" the text with a number of textual inferences, connected to a large set of presuppositions defined by a given context (knowledge basis, background assumptions, construction of schemata, links between schemata and text, system of values, construction of point of view, and so on). |
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It is possible to hypothesize that for every text there is a system which organizes the possible inferences of that text, and this system can be represented in an encyclopedic format. In this sense the text is a kind of idiolectal mechanism establishing encyclopedic correlations which are consistent only in that specific text. These cases have been defined (Eco 1976) as overcoding: the text constructs a particular semantic description representing the textually possible world, with its own individuals and properties. |
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