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Text (12) is particularly convincing about the co-text-sensitive nature of /on the other hand/: there is no reason to think that eating bananas is alternative to making music until the precise question (16) has established a textual opposition. |
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One must therefore rely upon a semantic representation of the ready-made syntagm /on the other hand/ which takes into account the semantic marker «alternativity to» and the selection «referring to the topic». |
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It is imprudent to speak of one textual topic. In fact, a text can function on the basis of various embedded topics. There are first of all sentence topics; discursive topics at the level of short sequences can rule the understanding of microstructural elements, while narrative topics can rule the comprehension of the text at higher levels. Topics are not always explicit. Sometimes these questions are manifested at the first level, and the reader simply cooperates by reducing the frames and by blowing up the semantic properties he needs. Sometimes there are topic-markers such as titles.
13 But many other times the reader has to guess where the real topic is hidden. |
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Frequently a text establishes its topic by reiterating blatantly a series of sememes belonging to the same semantic field (key words).14 In this case these sememes are obsessively reiterated throughout the text. At other times, on the contrary, these sememes cannot be statistically detected because, rather than being abundantly distributed, they are strategically located. In these cases the sensitive reader, feeling something unusual in the dispositio, tries to make abductions (that is, to single out a hidden rule or regularity) and to test them in the course of his further reading. That is why in reading literary texts one is obliged to look backward many times, and, in general, the more complex the text, the more it has to be read twice, and the second time from the end. |
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In Chapter 8 we shall see that Allais' story displays as a matter of fact two topics, one for the naive reader and one for the critical one. The former topic is rather evident, based as it is upon a blatant reiteration of key words. The latter is more carefully concealedor, like the purloined letter, is made visible only to a critical reader able to 'smell' where the relevant key words are strategically located. |
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Thus, according to which topic he has identified, the reader can read the text either as the story of an adultery or as the story of a misunderstanding. Such a double reading takes place at the higher level of narrative macropropositions (box 6), but the key words are disseminated in the linear text manifestations. |
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In either case the topic directs the right amalgamations and the organization of a single level of sense, or isotopy. Greimas (1970) calls isotopy "a redundant set of semantic categories which make possible the uniform reading of the story" (p. 188). There is a strong relation between topic |
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