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sentations about the 'world' which enable us to perform such basic cognitive acts as perception, language comprehension and actions'' (van Dijk, 1976b:31). In this sense the frame for supermarket determines ''units or chunks of concepts . . . denoting certain courses of events or courses of actions involving several objects, persons, properties, relations or facts" (van Dijk, 1976b:36; see for a previous attempt Petofi *, 1976b). Thus the supermarket frame would involve virtually the notion of a place where people enter to buy items of different types, pick them up without mediation of any vendor, pay for them all together at a terminal counter, and so on. Probably a good frame of this sort involves also the list of all the commodities one can find in a supermarket (brooms: yes; cars: no). In this sense a frame is already an inchoative text or a condensed story but also an encyclopedic representation of a sememe can be such; see the essay on Peirce (Chapter 7) and the example of the encyclopedic representation of lithium: I am presently uncertain whether this text represents an enlarged case-grammar-like encyclopedic analysis or the frame «producing lithium».10
0.6.1.6. Inferences by Intertextual Frames.
No text is read independently of the reader's experience of other texts. Intertextual knowledge (see especially Kristeva, 1970) can be considered a special case of over-coding and establishes its own intertextual frames (frequently to be identified with genre rules). The reader of (5) is convinced that Raoul raises his hand to strike because a lot of narrative situations have definitely overcoded the situation «comic quarrel between husband and wife». Even iconographical frames (thousand of hands raised to strike in thousands of pictures) help the reader to make his inference: intertextual knowledge (the extreme periphery of a semantic encyclopedia) encompasses all the semiotic systems with which the reader is familiar. The case (Joyce's Minucius Mandrake) studied in Chapter 2, on metaphor, is a good instance of a textual riddle that can be disambiguated only by means of intertextual information. (In my interpretation both the common frame «trial» and the textual frame «Mandrake hypnotizes» enter into play.) In Sue's Les Mystères de Paris, the first introduction of Fleur-de-Marie immediately reechoes the literary topos of 'la vierge souillée'. Every character (or situation) of a novel is immediately endowed with properties that the text does not directly manifest and that the reader has been "programmed" to borrow from the treasury of intertextuality.
Common frames come to the reader from his storage of encyclopedic knowledge and are mainly rules for practical life (Charniak, 1975). Intertextual frames, on the contrary, are already literary 'topoi', narrative schemes (see Riffaterre, 1973; 1976).
Frequently, the reader, instead of resorting to a common frame, picks up from the storage of his intertextual competence already reduced

 
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